One of her mother's new machinations unexpectedly furnished her with the means of ascertaining what she most desired to know.
The female agent of hell having been dismissed from the castle, Lady Ashton, who wrought by all variety of means, resolved to employ, for working the same end on Lucy's mind, an agent of a very different character.

This was no other than the Reverent Mr.Bide-the-Bent, a presbyterian clergyman, formerly mentioned, of the very strictest order and the most rigid orthodoxy, whose aid she called in, upon the principle of the tyrant in the in the tragedy: I'll have a priest shall preach her from her faith, And make it sin not to renounce that vow Which I'd have broken.
But Lady Ashton was mistaken in the agent she had selected.

His prejudices, indeed, were easily enlisted on her side, and it was no difficult matter to make him regard with horror the prospect of a union betwixt the daughter of a God-fearing, professing, and Presbyterian family of distinction and the heir of a bloodthirsty prelatist and persecutor, the hands of whose fathers had been dyed to the wrists in the blood of God's saints.

This resembled, in the divine's opinion, the union of a Moabitish stranger with a daughter of Zion.

But with all the more severe prejudices and principles of his sect, Bide-the-Bent possessed a sound judgment, and had learnt sympathy even in that very school of persecution where the heart is so frequently hardened.