Good-night; and remember that a bastard has no father!" With these words he moved on, and hurrying down the street, turned the corner and vanished.
Dalibard remained motionless for some minutes; at length he muttered: "Ay, let him go, he is dangerous! What son ever revolted even from the worst father, and throve in life?
Food for the gibbet! What matters ?" When next Dalibard visited Lucretia, his manner was changed; the cheerfulness he had before assumed gave place to a kind of melancholy compassion; he no longer entered into her plans for the future, but would look at her mournfully, start up, and walk away.

She would have attributed the change to some return of his ancient passion, but she heard him once murmur with unspeakable pity, "Poor child, poor child!" A vague apprehension seized her,--first, indeed, caught from some remarks dropped by Mr.Fielden, which were less discreet than Dalibard had recommended.

A day or two afterwards, she asked Mainwaring, carelessly, why he had never spoken to her at Laughton of his acquaintance with Fielden.
"You asked me that before," he said, somewhat sullenly.
"Did I?
I forget! But how was it?
Tell me again." "I scarcely know," he replied confusedly; "we were always talking of each other or poor Sir Miles,--our own hopes and fears." This was true, and a lover's natural excuse.

In the present of love all the past is forgotten.
"Still," said Lucretia, with her sidelong glance,--"still, as you must have seen much of my own sister--" Mainwaring, while she spoke, was at work on a button on his gaiter (gaiters were then worn tight at the ankle); the effort brought the blood to his forehead.
"But," he said, still stooping at his occupation, "you were so little intimate with your sister; I feared to offend.

Family differences are so difficult to approach." Lucretia was satisfied at the moment; for so vast was her stake in Mainwaring's heart, so did her whole heart and soul grapple to the rock left serene amidst the deluge, that she habitually and resolutely thrust from her mind all the doubts that at times invaded it.
"I know," she would often say to herself,--"I know he does not love as I do; but man never can, never ought to love as woman! Were I a man, I should scorn myself if I could be so absorbed in one emotion as I am proud to be now,--I, poor woman! I know," again she would think,--"I know how suspicious and distrustful I am; I must not distrust him,--I shall only irritate, I may lose him: I dare not distrust,--it would be too dreadful." Thus, as a system vigorously embraced by a determined mind, she had schooled and forced herself into reliance on her lover.