When Mannering returned to England, his first object had been to place his daughter in a seminary for female education, of established character.  Not, however, finding her progress in the accomplishments which he wished her to acquire so rapid as his impatience expected, he had withdrawn Miss Mannering from the school at the end of the first quarter.  So she had only time to form an eternal friendship with Miss Matilda Marchmont, a young lady about her own age, which was nearly eighteen.  To her faithful eye were addressed those formidable quires which issued forth from Mervyn Hall on the wings of the post while Miss Mannering was a guest there.  The perusal of a few short extracts from these may be necessary to render our story intelligible.

FIRST EXTRACT

’Alas! my dearest Matilda, what a tale is mine to tell!  Misfortune from the cradle has set her seal upon your unhappy friend.  That we should be severed for so slight a cause—­an ungrammatical phrase in my Italian exercise, and three false notes in one of Paisiello’s sonatas!  But it is a part of my father’s character, of whom it is impossible to say whether I love, admire, or fear him the most.  His success in life and in war, his habit of making every obstacle yield before the energy of his exertions, even where they seemed insurmountable—­all these have given a hasty and peremptory cast to his character, which can neither endure contradiction nor make allowance for deficiencies.  Then he is himself so very accomplished.  Do you know, there was a murmur, half confirmed too by some mysterious words which dropped from my poor mother, that he possesses other sciences, now lost to the world, which enable the possessor to summon up before him the dark and shadowy forms of future events!  Does not the very idea of such a power, or even of the high talent and commanding intellect which the world may mistake for it,—­does it not, dear Matilda, throw a mysterious grandeur about its possessor?  You will call this romantic; but consider I was born in the land of talisman and spell, and my childhood lulled by tales which you can only enjoy through the gauzy frippery of a French translation.  O, Matilda, I wish you could have seen the dusky visages of my Indian attendants, bending in earnest devotion round the magic narrative, that flowed, half poetry, half prose, from the lips of the tale-teller!  No wonder that European fiction sounds cold and meagre, after the wonderful effects which I have seen the romances of the East produce upon their hearers.’

SECOND EXTRACT

’You are possessed, my dear Matilda, of my bosom-secret, in those sentiments with which I regard Brown.  I will not say his memory; I am convinced he lives, and is faithful.  His addresses to me were countenanced by my deceased parent, imprudently countenanced perhaps, considering the prejudices of my father in favour of birth and rank.  But I, then almost a girl, could not be expected surely to be wiser than her under whose charge nature had placed me.  My father, constantly engaged in military duty, I saw but at rare intervals, and was taught to look up to him with more awe than confidence.  Would to Heaven it had been otherwise!  It might have been better for us all at this day!’