Hastening toward them, she fell on the bosom of her
father; and while she bathed his face and hands with her glad tears,
he, too, wept, and mingled blessings with his caresses. No coldness
here met his paternal heart: no distracting confusions tore her from
his arms; no averted looks, by turns, alarmed and chilled the bosom of
tenderness. All was innocence and duty in Helen's breast; and every
ingenuous action showed its affection and its joy. The estranged heart
of Lady Mar had closed against him; and though he suspected not its
wanderings, he felt the unutterable difference between the warm
transports of his daughter and the frigid gratulations forced from the
lips of his wife.
Lady Mar gazed with a weird frown on the lovely form of Helen, as she
wound her exquisitely turned arms round the earl in filial tenderness.
Her bosom, heaving in the snowy whiteness of virgin purity; her face,
radiant with the softest blooms of youth; all seemed to frame an object
which malignant fiends had conjured up to blast her stepdame's hope.
"Wallace will behold these charms!" cried her distracted spirit to
herself, "and then, where am I?"
While her thoughts thus followed each other, she unconsciously darted
looks on Helen, which, if an evil eye had any bewitching power, would
have withered all her beauties.
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