I'm sure love will never break her heart; and she's so proud, she'd throw him off without a sigh, if she knew how things stood." "I believe you are right," said Mr.Fielden; "for truth is the best policy, after all.

Still, it's scarce my business to meddle; and if it were not for Susan--Well, well, I must think of it, and pray Heaven to direct me." This conference suffices to explain to the reader the stage to which the history of Lucretia had arrived.

Willingly we pass over what it were scarcely possible to describe,--her first shock at the fall from the expectations of her life; fortune, rank, and what she valued more than either, power, crushed at a blow.

From the dark and sullen despair into which she was first plunged, she was roused into hope, into something like joy, by Mainwaring's letters.

Never had they been so warm and so tender; for the young man felt not only poignant remorse that he had been the cause of her downfall (though she broke it to him with more delicacy than might have been expected from the state of her feelings and the hardness of her character), but he felt also imperiously the obligations which her loss rendered more binding than ever.