’And thus both the necessity for engrossment, and the stupid content in the present, produce the same effects.  But this poor Mrs. Boucher! how little we can do for her.’

’And yet we dare not leave her without our efforts, although they may seem so useless.  Oh papa! it’s a hard world to live in!’

’So it is, my child.  We feel it so just now, at any rate; but we have been very happy, even in the midst of our sorrow.  What a pleasure Frederick’s visit was!’

‘Yes, that it was,’ said Margaret; brightly.  ’It was such a charming, snatched, forbidden thing.’  But she suddenly stopped speaking.  She had spoiled the remembrance of Frederick’s visit to herself by her own cowardice.  Of all faults the one she most despised in others was the want of bravery; the meanness of heart which leads to untruth.  And here had she been guilty of it!  Then came the thought of Mr. Thornton’s cognisance of her falsehood.  She wondered if she should have minded detection half so much from any one else.  She tried herself in imagination with her Aunt Shaw and Edith; with her father; with Captain and Mr. Lennox; with Frederick.  The thought of the last knowing what she had done, even in his own behalf, was the most painful, for the brother and sister were in the first flush of their mutual regard and love; but even any fall in Frederick’s opinion was as nothing to the shame, the shrinking shame she felt at the thought of meeting Mr. Thornton again.  And yet she longed to see him, to get it over; to understand where she stood in his opinion.  Her cheeks burnt as she recollected how proudly she had implied an objection to trade (in the early days of their acquaintance), because it too often led to the deceit of passing off inferior for superior goods, in the one branch; of assuming credit for wealth and resources not possessed, in the other.  She remembered Mr. Thornton’s look of calm disdain, as in few words he gave her to understand that, in the great scheme of commerce, all dishonourable ways of acting were sure to prove injurious in the long run, and that, testing such actions simply according to the poor standard of success, there was folly and not wisdom in all such, and every kind of deceit in trade, as well as in other things.  She remembered—­she, then strong in her own untempted truth—­asking him, if he did not think that buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market proved some want of the transparent justice which is so intimately connected with the idea of truth:  and she had used the word chivalric—­and her father had corrected her with the higher word, Christian; and so drawn the argument upon himself, while she sate silent by with a slight feeling of contempt.