Miss Costigan was a paragon of virtue and delicacy; she was as sensitive as the most timid maiden; she was as pure as the unsullied snow; she had the finest manners, the most graceful wit and genius, the most charming refinement and justness of appreciation in all matters of taste; she had the most admirable temper and devotion to her father, a good old gentleman of high family and fallen fortunes, who had lived, however, with the best society in Europe: he was in no hurry, and could afford to wait any time,--till he was one-and-twenty.

But he felt (and here his face assumed an awful and harrowing solemnity) that he was engaged in the one only passion of his life, and that DEATH alone could close it.
Helen told him, with a sad smile and shake of the head, that people survived these passions, and as for long engagements contracted between very young men and old women--she knew an instance in her own family--Laura's poor father was an instance--how fatal they were.
Mr.Pen, however, was resolved that death must be his doom in case of disappointment, and rather than this--rather than baulk him, in fact--this lady would have submitted to any sacrifice or personal pain, and would have gone down on her knees and have kissed the feet of a Hottentot daughter-in-law.
Arthur knew his power over the widow, and the young tyrant was touched whilst he exercised it.

In those two days he brought her almost into submission, and patronised her very kindly; and he passed one evening with the lovely pie-maker at Chatteris, in which he bragged of his influence over his mother; and he spent the other night in composing a most flaming and conceited copy of verses to his divinity, in which he vowed, like Montrose, that he would make her famous with his sword and glorious by his pen, and that he would love her as no mortal woman had been adored since the creation of womankind.
It was on that night, long after midnight, that wakeful Helen, passing stealthily by her son's door, saw a light streaming through the chink of the door into the dark passage, and heard Pen tossing and tumbling, and mumbling verses in his bed.

She waited outside for a while, anxiously listening to him.

In infantile fevers and early boyish illnesses, many a night before, the kind soul had so kept watch.