would seem like the ravings of insanity, you would not and you could
not despise me, though you might abhor.

And now Heaven guard and bless you! Nothing on _earth_ could injure
you. And even the wicked who have looked upon you learn to pray,--I
have prayed for you!


Thus, abrupt and signatureless, ended the expected letter. Lucy came
down the next morning at her usual hour, and, except that she was very
pale, nothing in her appearance seemed to announce past grief or emotion.
The squire asked her if she had received the promised letter. She
answered, in a clear though faint voice, that she had,--that Mr. Clifford
had confessed himself of too low an origin to hope for marriage with Mr.
Brandon's family; that she trusted the squire would keep his secret; and
that the subject might never again be alluded to by either. If in this
speech there was something alien to Lucy's ingenuous character, and
painful to her mind, she felt it as it were a duty to her former lover
not to betray the whole of that confession so bitterly wrung from him.
Perhaps, too, there was in that letter a charm which seemed to her too
sacred to be revealed to any one; and mysteries were not excluded even
from a love so ill-placed and seemingly so transitory as hers.

Lucy's answer touched the squire in his weak point. "A man of
decidedly low origin," he confessed, "was utterly out of the question;
nevertheless, the young man showed a great deal of candour in his
disclosure." He readily promised never to broach a subject necessarily
so unpleasant; and though he sighed as he finished his speech, yet the
extreme quiet of Lucy's manner reassured him; and when he perceived that
she resumed, though languidly, her wonted avocations, he felt but little