CHAPTER XXXIII.
JOHANNA WALKS ABROAD IN DISGUISE.
But, amid all the trials, and perplexities, and anxieties that beset the dramatis personæ of our story, who suffered like Johanna? What heart bled as hers bled? What heart heaved with sad emotion as hers heaved? Alas! poor Johanna, let the fate of Mark Ingestrie be what it might, he could not feel the pangs that tore thy gentle heart. Truly might she have said—
“Man’s love is of his life a thing apart
‘Tis woman’s whole existence,”
for she felt that her joy—her life itself, was bartered for the remembrance of how she had been loved by him whose fate was involved in one of the most painful and most inscrutable of mysteries. Where could she seek for consolation, where for hope? The horizon of her young life seemed ever darkening, and the
