CHAPTER IV.

IT was speedily accomplished, and they exchanged their gay quarters for the barracks in the large provincial town of C—.

As Catherine had anticipated, their altered fortunes produced an alteration in Augusta's friendship, which from long and frequent visits, now rapidly descended into few and short epistles, and at last into a cessation of all correspondence. Thus having, as she hoped, entirely lost sight of her, Catherine soon forgot there was such a being in existence, and resumed the captivating ease and gaiety of temper and manner, which in her was as natural as it was charming, and which still rendered her as attractive to her husband as in the first period of their marriage.

For six years they continued, with few interruptions, to taste a degree of felicity not often allotted to 'the inhabitants of this fleeting scene. True, they had their trials, and Catherine more particularly her's; though, in the confidence of her young and energetic spirit, she had imagined none beyond the loss of her husband's love. But then she knew not the boundless anxiety, the incessant hopes and fears, which in the character of a mother were to be her portion. She had the misfortune to lose three of her children; and her eldest boy was so delicate in health as to keep her in continual dread of his following them. Still

she was happy, for St. Aubyn loved her; and, nothing occurring to excite the violence of her passions, though much in her ardent affection for her children to produce many endearing qualities, he entirely devoted himself to her, and to those domestic, quiet pleasures, for which his elegant mind and gentle temper so peculiarly qualified him. Most of their evenings were spent only in each other's society; when, in the alternate amusements of reading and music, time passed on by them on golden wings. He often made her happy in speaking of the enjoyment he derived from her conversation and acquirements; and, thus continually stimulated by the desire of deserving his praise, she took incessant pains to improve the accompliments she possessed, and to store her intelligent mind with information. She had always a love for literature; and St. Aubyn, being a liberal-minded man, valued her the more for every advantage her reading gave her. But, though he was thus generous, it was not to be supposed that others would prove so; especially in a provincial town, where knowledge is less diffused, and where, to bestow the appellation of a literary lady, is pretty much the same in its tendency as setting up the cry of a mad dog; every body is terribly afraid to meet it singly, but uncommonly courageous in joining the mob in hooting and pelting it.

Her intellectual advantages, therefore, did not render her popular, but they preserved her the love and respect of her husband; and she was rather too unguarded in manifesting how perfectly she despised the sentiments of every one else. Upon this point St. Aubyn conceived her to blame, and hence it was

that their only differences occurred; she condemning as pusillanimous his terror of making enemies; and he, though often compelled to smile at the cleverness and spirit of her remarks, still on the whole reproving as satirical, and calculated to procure for her the character of ill-natured, her unguarded habit of detailing her opinion of things and persons.

In defiance, however, of all her faults, and sometimes he would say he believed almost for them, he loved her very fervently. Her variation of mind kept him perpetually alive, and, as we have just said, nothing occurring to rouse the violence of her passions, they were happy.

Alas, they were! But happiness had continued its season, and the vicissitudes of fate were again about to visit them; and again they came in the only form that was likely to be fatal, for they came in the form of that being, who seemed to Catherine's undisciplined mind to be commissioned as an evil spirit, to cross her path and make it desolate.

It was with feelings of little less than horror that, about this time, she heard that one of the officers of St. Aubyn's regiment, and a very intimate companion of his, was going to be married to a Miss Belmont, whom he had encountered at Cheltenham. She buoyed herself up with every possible suggestion of its being some other Miss Belmont than the one she knew; though the regular circuit of watering places Augusta was in the habit of making, rendered it but too probable that she was the person.

The fact was soon confirmed to her by St. Aubyn himself; who, in some little confusion at mentioning again a name, which as if by mutual consent had long been a stranger to the lips of both of them, informed VOL. I.-F

her that it really was Augusta whom Captain Elliot intended very shortly to marry.

It seemed almost impossible that the tranquillity of six years could have been so instantaneously disturbed, as it was in the mind of Catherine by this intelligence. It was not that she did not rely upon St. Aubyn's constancy, for she soothed, or rather tried to soothe away the fears, which in the glance of an instant recalled her past sufferings, and the possibility of a repetition of them, by dwelling upon the fond, the faithful assurances he had formerly given her of his indifference to Augusta-assurances which his conduct as a husband had so truly so sweetly justified. But still the terror of seeing him, as she feared she should, subject every day of his life to the allurements of a woman, who lived only upon the tributes of admiration she extorted from every man who came in her way to think of this was to give herself up to misery! But she would not think of it! "No, I will not," she said, starting up from a reverie, in which she had been revelling in wretchedness for more than two hours; "Augusta must be changed in the course of six years; she cannot be the same frivolous being now that she was then-and a wife too!-oh no! I am to blame to judge her so hastily-I will struggle for better thoughts-I will not be thus foolish." A resolution which prompted her to school her mind, by the best efforts of which she was capable, into a more reasonable frame.

In some degree they succeeded, and by the time Augusta arrived, she had formed a determination to meet her, at least with civility, and with a behaviour which should indicate that time had enabled her to bury in oblivion whatever she had formerly disliked

in her conduct. Imagining that Mrs. Elliot on her part would be equally disposed to forget it, Catherine was tolerably tranquil when she accompanied her husband to pay her the compliment of a morning call, as soon as she was established in the place.

at seventeen.

She found her just the same wild, thoughtless creature she had ever known her; improved in beauty, which was certainly of the most striking kind, but not a jot more sedate than when she was her guest She was, or appeared to Catherine, even more ridiculous in her manners; and it was not difficult to perceive, before she had been ten minutes in her company, that if her former familiarity with St. Aubyn was not renewed, it would be owing to his disinclination to it, and not hers.

Captain Elliot was a good humoured, but weak man; who was satisfied to call a handsome, fashionable young woman his wife, without being at all precise, or it might be said even correct, in his notions of what was becoming in female conduct.

They returned home from their visit to the new married pair in not a very communicative mood. Catherine really desired to avoid exciting any suspicion in St. Aubyn's mind of her revived dislike to Augusta ; and he had kept the most guarded silence in respect to the past, ever since her name had been again introduced to his notice.

As Catherine was gifted with that faculty for observation which is always bent upon discovering more than appears (a pernicious habit, in a world wherein so many things contribute to misapprehension,) she fancied that this strict reserve on his part resulted from some feelings (of what nature she could not to herself define, but) calculated to give pain, because