might have produced effects as sinister on nerves of stronger fibre if
accompanied by a heart as delicately sensitive, an honour as exquisitely
pure.

The letter found in her hand was without name; it was dated from L----,
and bore the postmark of that town. It conveyed to Lilian, in the biting
words which female malice can make so sharp, the tale we had sought
sedulously to guard from her ear,--her flight, the construction that
scandal put upon it. It affected for my blind infatuation a contemptuous
pity; it asked her to pause before she brought on the name I offered to
her an indelible disgrace. If she so decided, she was warned not to
return to L----, or to prepare there for the sentence that would exclude
her from the society of her own sex. I cannot repeat more, I cannot
minute down all that the letter expressed or implied, to wither the orange
blossoms in a bride's wreath. The heart that took in the venom cast its
poison on the brain, and the mind fled before the presence of a thought so
deadly to all the ideas which its innocence had heretofore conceived.

I knew not whom to suspect of the malignity of this mean and miserable
outrage, nor did I much care to know. The handwriting, though evidently
disguised, was that of a woman, and, therefore, had I discovered the
author, my manhood would have forbidden me the idle solace of revenge.
Mrs. Poyntz, however resolute and pitiless her hostility when once
aroused, was not without a certain largeness of nature irreconcilable with
the most dastardly of all the weapons that envy or hatred can supply to
the vile. She had too lofty a self-esteem and too decorous a regard for
the moral sentiment of the world that she typified, to do, or connive at,
an act which degrades the gentlewoman. Putting her aside, what other
female enemy had Lilian provoked? No matter! What other woman at L----
was worth the condescension of a conjecture?