The Widowed Bride — page 225: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

216 THE WIDOWED BRIDE. And as Antonia Clive looked up to the earl’s shocked face, _he saw the light of hopeless insanity shining in her E eres CHAPTER XXXI. RENA PERCIVAL’S FATE. The mystery at Glenhampton Castle was no longer a mys- tery, and for a few months the painful notoriety of the ter- rible events which had transpired there, both in the past and present, rendered the temporary absense of the family an imperative necessity. Miss Clive had, in the meantime, been placed in a private lunatic asylum. And while the castle was shrouded in closed blinds, the twice-widowed HKarl of Glenhampton, with his three beanti- ful daughters, was dwelling in one of the lovely sheltered vales that edge the Lake of Geneva in Switzerland, trying to forget all but the peaceful present. Lady Blanche Arden had perhaps suffered more than any of the rest of the family in the horrible events which had so recently transpired. She had loved and trusted in her mother so fully that it was like rending away a portion of her own being, to be compelled to lose that faith. The love she could not lose—her real nature was like that of the heroine of the old ballad who sings so mournfully : “T know not, I care not, if guilt’s in that heart, I but know that I love thee whatever thou art!” And so she mourned and worshiped her mother’s memory, even while she knew that the memory was overshadowed by _ the thick darkness of an awful crime! But youth is essentially elasticand Heaven has mercifully decreed that the heaviest shall not always have power to overshadow our souls. Moreover there were other influences _ which tended to soften the poignancy of Blanche’s sufferings. a. “comicbooks.com