mercy, Gabrielle caimly replied: "Do so, and I will take care that your
father shall know that your plea for his pardon through Madame la Baronne
was a scheme to blacken his name, and to frustrate his marriage. Do not
think that he will suppose you did not connive at a project so sly; he
must know you too well, pretty innocent." No match for Gabrielle
Desmarets, Matilda flung from the house, leaving Jasper whistling an air
from Figaro; returned alone to the French town from which she now wrote
to Caroline, pouring out her wrongs, and, without seeming sensible that
Caroline had been wronged too, expressing her fear that her father might
believe her an accomplice in Jasper's plot, and refuse her the means to
live apart from the wretch; upon whom she heaped every epithet that just
indignation could suggest to a feeble mind. The latter part of the
letter, blurred and blotted, was incoherent, almost raving. In fact
Matilda was then seized by the mortal illness which hurried her to her
grave. To the Marquess much of this letter was extremely uninteresting
--much of it quite incomprehensible. He could not see why it should so
overpoweringly affect his wife. Only those passages which denounced a
scheme to frustrate some marriage meditated by Mr. Darrell made him
somewhat uneasy, and appeared to him to demand an explanation. But
Caroline, in the anguish to which she awakened, forestalled his
inquiries. To her but two thoughts were present--how she had wronged
Darrell--how ungrateful and faithless she must seem to him; and in the
impulse of her remorse, and in the childlike candour of her soul,
artlessly, ingenuously, she poured out her feelings to the husband she
had taken as counsellor and guide, as if seeking to guard all her sorrow
for the past from a sentiment that might render her less loyal to the
responsibilities which linked her future to another's. A man of sense
would have hailed in so noble a confidence (however it might have pained
him for the time) a guarantee for the happiness and security of his whole
existence. He would have seen how distinct from that ardent love which