Charles Adams was deeply moved by the nobleness of his niece, and reproved his daughter more harshly than he had ever done before, for the feebleness that created so strong and unjust a passion.  This had the contrary effect to what he had hoped for:  she did not hesitate to say that her cousin had endeavoured to rob her both of the affection of her lover and her father.  The injured cousin left Repton bowed beneath an accumulation of troubles, not one of which was of her own creating, not one of which she deserved; and all springing from the unproviding nature of him who, had he been asked the question, would have declared himself ready to sacrifice his own life for the advantage of that daughter, now compelled to work for her own bread.  To trace the career of Mary Adams in her new calling, would be to repeat what I have said before.  The more refined, the more informed the governess, the more she suffers.  Being with one whom she had known in better days, made it even more hard to bend; yet she did her duty, and that is one of the highest privileges a woman can enjoy.

CHAPTER VI.

Leaving Mary for a moment, let us return to Repton.  Here discord, having once entered, was making sad ravages, and all were suffering from it.  It was but too true that the eldest of the Adamses had deserted; his mother clinging with a parent’s fondness to her child, concealed him, and thus offended Charles Adams beyond all reconciliation.  The third lad, who was walking the London hospitals, and exerting himself beyond his strength, was everything that a youth could be; but his declining health was represented to his uncle, by one of those whom his mother’s pride had insulted, as a cloak for indolence.  In short, before another year had quite passed, the family of the once rich and fashionable Dr. Adams had shared the fate of all dependents—­worn out the benevolence, or patience, or whatever it really is, of their “best friends.”  Nor was this the only consequence of the physician’s neglect of a duty due alike to God and society; his brother had really done so much for the bereaved family, as to give what the world called “just grounds” to Mrs. Charles Adams’s repeated complaints, “that now her husband was ruining his industrious family to keep the lazy widow of his spend-thrift brother and her favourite children in idleness.  Why could she not live upon the ‘fine folk’ she was always throwing in her face?” The daughter, too, of whose approaching union the fond father had been so proud, was now, like her cousin whom she had wronged by her mean suspicions, deserted; the match broken off after much bickering; one quarrel having brought on another, until they separated by mutual consent.  Her temper and her health were both materially impaired; and her beauty was converted into hardness and acidity.