“SUMMERFIELD COTTAGE.

“Sir,—­I should feel myself utterly unworthy of the good opinion which I trust I am honored with by your admirable daughter, were I any longer to remain silent upon a subject of the deepest importance to her future happiness.  I understand that she is almost immediately about to become the wife of Lord Dunroe.  Now, sir, I entreat your most serious attention; and I am certain, if you will only bestow it upon the few words I am about to write, that you, and especially Miss Gourlay, will live to thank God that I interposed to prevent this unhallowed union.  I say then, emphatically, as I shall be able to prove most distinctly, that if you permit Miss Gourlay to become the wife of this young nobleman you will seal her ruin—­defeat the chief object which you cherish, for her in life, and live to curse the day on which you urged it on.  The communications which I have to make are of too much importance to be committed to paper; but if you will only allow me, and I once more implore it for the sake of your child, as well as for your own future ease of mind, the privilege of a short interview, I shall completely satisfy you as to the truth of what I state.

“I have the honor to be, sir,

“Your obliged and obedient servant,

“Martha Mainwaring.”

Having perused the first sentence of this earnest and friendly letter, Sir Thomas indignantly flung it into a drawer where he kept all communications to which it did not please him at the moment to pay particular attention.

Lucy’s health in the meantime was fast breaking:  but so delicate and true was her sense of honor and duty that she would have looked upon any clandestine communication with her lover as an infraction of the solemn engagement into which she had entered for her father’s sake,—­and by which, even at the expense of her own happiness, she considered herself bound.  Still, she felt that a communication on the subject was due to him, and her principal hope now was that her father would allow her to make it.  If he, however, refused this sanction to an act of common justice, then she resolved to write to him openly, and make the wretched circumstances in which she was involved, and the eternal barrier that had been placed between them, known to him at once.

Her father, however, now found, to his utter mortification, that he was driving matters somewhat too fast, and that his daughter’s health must unquestionably be restored before he could think of outraging humanity and public decency by forcing her from the sick bed to the altar.

After leaving her brother on the occasion of their last remarkable interview, she retired to her room so full of wretchedness, indignation, and despair of all human aid or sympathy, that she scarcely knew whether their conversation was a dream or a reality.  Above all things, the shock she received through her whole moral system, delicately and finely tempered as it was, so completely prostrated her physical strength, and estranged all the virtuous instincts of her noble nature, that it was with difficulty she reached her own room.  When there, she immediately rang for her maid, who at once perceived by the indignant sparkle of her eye, the heightened color of her cheek, and the energetic agitation of her voice, that something exceedingly unpleasant had occurred.