after accusing her, in language little more consistent with the respect
due to the fair sex than that which he had addressed to Sophy, of all the
desolation that the perfidious nuptials of Caroline Lyndsay had brought
upon Guy Darrell, declared that the least Lady Montfort could do to
repair the wrongs inflicted by Caroline Lyndsay, was--not to pity his
master!--that her pity was killing him. He repeated, with some grotesque
comments of his own, but on the whole not inaccurately, what Darrell had
said to him on the subject of her pity. He then informed her of
Darrell's consent to Lionel's marriage with Sophy; in which criminal
espousals it was clear, from Darrell's words, that Lady Montfort had had
some nefarious share. In the most lugubrious colours he brought before
her the consequences of that marriage--the extinguished name, the
demolished dwelling-place, the renunciation of native soil itself. He
called upon her, by all that was sacred, to contrive some means to undo
the terrible mischief she had originally occasioned, and had recently
helped to complete. His epistle ended by an attempt to conciliate and
coax. He revived the image of that wild Caroline Lyndsay, to whom HE had
never refused a favour; whose earliest sums he had assisted to cast up--
to whose young idea he had communicated the elementary principles of the
musical gamut--to whom he had played on his flute, winter eve and summer
noon, by the hour together; that Caroline Lyndsay, who when a mere child,
had led Guy Darrell where she willed, as by a thread of silk. Ah, how
Fairthorn had leapt for joy when, eighteen years ago, he had thought that
Caroline Lyndsay was to be the sunshine and delight of the house to which
she had lived to bring the cloud and the grief! And by all these
memories, Fairthorn conjured her either to break off the marriage she had
evidently helped to bring about, or, failing that, to convince Guy
Darrell that he was not the object of her remorseful and affectionate
compassion.