her to meditate on aught beside the man she was perpetually vowing she would forget. Alas! he appeared the sole tenant of her memory, so intimately was his idea entwined with every feeling of her nature. It was not in the power of either time, absence, or a sense of his injurious unkindness, to banish his loved image from her mind, though every day she repeated her vain words, “I will think of him no more!” But how could she cease to think of him, in the perilous days when the impending cloud of ruin gathered more darkly every hour over his cause, and the events of the next might lead him to a prison or a scaffold, if, indeed, he escaped the contingencies of the battlefield, or survived the hardships and dangers of the siege of Colchester, where he was now shut up with Lord Capel and the rest of its brave defenders, by the beleaguering force of Sir Thomas Fairfax.

The parents of Colonel Dagworth and Helen Milbourne had been neighbours, but not friends; they belonged to separate and distinct classes of society. The proud old Norfolk knight, Sir Reginald Dagworth, whose only son Colonel Dagworth was, looked down with unfeigned contempt on the acquired wealth and ostentatious pretensions of Master Ralph Milbourne, who had purchased large estates in his immediate vicinity; and whose magnificent new-built mansion, large establishment, and showy equipages, were calculated to excite a painful comparison with the faded splendour of his ancient family,—a family that once held almost princely rank and possessions in his native country, but which, in consequence of a series of imprudences or vicissitudes, was rapidly sinking into decay.

The undesirable location of a wealthy parvenu neighbour was a subject of great annoyance both to Sir Reginald Dagworth and Lady Alice, his wife, who considered it incumbent on them, for the honour of their house, to make an effort to support the superiority of their claims to be the great people of the place; while Ralph Milbourne failed not on his part to testify all the offensive contempt for rank and ancestry which is one of the peculiar characteristics of vulgar pride, and on all occasions obtruded an offensive opposition to every measure Sir Reginald appeared desirous of carrying in county business. It was much to be lamented that these sylvan foes had nothing better to occupy their time and thoughts than a hostile espionage on each other’s actions, and an eager and unworthy attention to the exaggerated reports of servants and dependents of what each said of the other; for by this means a feud so deadly was fostered, that the breaking out of the civil war between the king and parliament was privately hailed by both with a degree of satisfaction, as affording an excuse for those open acts of violence and aggression which the laws had hitherto operated to prevent. They were arrayed, of course, on opposite sides, for Sir Reginald Dagworth was a part of the old régime—a concomitant ingredient of that system which it was the object of the republican party to destroy; and Ralph Milbourne’s hatred of that privileged class, which, he was sensible, looked down on him and his golden claims to consideration with contempt, was such, that he was willing to hazard even the loss of that wealth which he secretly worshipped, to assist in humbling its haughty and hated members. There were but two things he loved on earth—his money and his one fair daughter; whom he regarded as its heiress, and prized her perhaps more dearly on that account than for all the charms both of mind and person with which nature had so richly endowed her.

But though he professed such hostility of feeling against the whole order of aristocracy, which was then, as at the present moment, peculiarly denounced by a party as the authors of all the existing or fancied evils in the state, he was secretly desirous of his descendants in the third generation being members of this vituperated body, through the marriage of his daughter with no less a person than the heir of his sworn enemy; and deeply mortified at the apparent insensibility of young Dagworth to the attractions of his lovely daughter, and his blindness to the pecuniary advantages of such an alliance, he was perpetually venting his chagrin by contemptuous expressions respecting him; constantly warning Helen never to degrade herself by bestowing a thought upon him; protesting that, if she condescended to be made a convenience of, by wedding the heir of impoverished greatness, to patch up the fallen fortunes of his house with her wealth, he would utterly renounce her.

These cautions were, perhaps, in the first instance, the occasion of making Edward Dagworth an object of attention to his fair neighbour; for she concluded that he must have given her father some reason for an observation so otherwise unaccountable to her. She even ventured to imagine that overtures of a