these moments that she had written to Mordaunt; and had the contest
continued much longer the reason of the unfortunate and persecuted
girl would have totally deserted her.

She was a person of acute, and even poignant, sensibilities, and these
the imperfect nature of her education had but little served to guide
or to correct; but as her habits were pure and good, the impulses
which spring from habit were also sinless and exalted, and, if they
erred, "they leaned on virtue's side," and partook rather of a
romantic and excessive generosity than of the weakness of womanhood or
the selfishness of passion. All the misery and debasement of her
equivocal and dependent situation had not been able to drive her into
compliance with Mordaunt's passionate and urgent prayers; and her
heart was proof even to the eloquence of love, when that eloquence
pointed towards the worldly injury and depreciation of her lover: but
this new persecution was utterly unforeseen in its nature and
intolerable from its cause. To marry another; to be torn forever from
one in whom her whole heart was wrapped; to be forced not only to
forego his love, but to feel that the very thought of him was a
crime,--all this, backed by the vehement and galling insults of her
relations, and the sullen and unmoved meanness of her intended
bridegroom, who answered her candour and confession with a stubborn
indifference and renewed overtures, made a load of evil which could
neither be borne with resignation nor contemplated with patience.

She was sitting, after she had sent her letter, with her two
relations, for they seldom trusted her out of their sight, when Mr.
Glumford was announced. Now, Mr. George Glumford was a country
gentleman of what might be termed a third-rate family in the county:
he possessed about twelve hundred a year, to say nothing of the odd