"Here laws are all inviolate: none lay
Traps for the traveller; every highway's clear;
Here--" he was interrupted by a knife,
With "D---your eyes! your money or your life!"

Don Juan.

Misfortunes are like the creations of Cadmus,--they destroy one another!
Roused from the torpor of mind occasioned by the loss of her lover at the
sudden illness of the squire, Lucy had no thought for herself, no thought
for any one, for anything but her father, till long after the earth had
closed over his remains. The very activity of the latter grief was less
dangerous than the quiet of the former; and when the first keenness of
sorrow passed away, and her mind gradually and mechanically returned to
the remembrance of Clifford, it was with an intensity less strong, and
less fatal to her health and happiness than before. She thought it
unnatural and criminal to allow anything else to grieve her, while she
had so sacred a grief as that of her loss; and her mind, once aroused
into resistance to passion, betrayed a native strength little to have
been expected from her apparent character. Sir William Brandon lost no
time in returning to town after the burial of his brother. He insisted
upon taking his niece with him; and, though with real reluctance, she
yielded to his wishes, and accompanied him. By the squire's will,
indeed, Sir William was appointed guardian to Lucy, and she yet wanted
more than a year of her majority. Brandon, with a delicacy very uncommon
to him where women (for he was a confirmed woman-hater) were concerned,
provided everything that he thought could in any way conduce to her
comfort. He ordered it to be understood in his establishment that she
was its mistress. He arranged and furnished, according to what he
imagined to be her taste, a suite of apartments for her sole