les of love and wonder, and readily identifying herself
with the situation of those legendary heroines with whose adventures,
for want of better reading, her memory had become stocked. The fairy
wand, with which in her solitude she had delighted to raise visions of
enchantment, became now the rod of a magician, the bond slave of evil
genii, serving only to invoke spectres at which the exorcist trembled.
She felt herself the object of suspicion, of scorn, of dislike at least,
if not of hatred, to her own family; and it seemed to her that she was
abandoned by the very person on whose account she was exposed to
the enmity of all around her. Indeed, the evidence of Ravenswood's
infidelity began to assume every day a more determined character.
A soldier of fortune, of the name of Westenho, an old familiar of
Craigengelt's, chanced to arrive from abroad about this time. The worthy
Captain, though without any precise communication with Lady Ashton,
always acted most regularly and sedulously in support of her plans,
and easily prevailed upon his friend, by dint of exaggeration of real
circumstances and coming of others, to give explicit testimony to the
truth of Ravenswood's approaching marriage.

Thus beset on all hands, and in a manner reduced to despair, Lucy's
temper gave way under the pressure of constant affliction and
persecution. She became gloomy and abstracted, and, contrary to her
natural and ordinary habit of mind, sometimes turned with spirit, and
even fierceness, on those by whom she was long and closely annoyed. Her
health also began to be shaken, and her hectic cheek and wandering
eye gave symptoms of what is called a fever upon the spirits. In most
mothers this would have moved compassion; but Lady Ashton, compact and
firm of purpose, saw these waverings of health and intellect with no
greater sympathy than that with which the hostile engineer regards the
towers of a beleaguered city as they reel under the discharge of his
artillery; or rather, she considered these starts and inequalities of
temper as symptoms of Lucy's expiring resolution; as the angler, by the
throes and convulsive exertions of the fish which he has hooked,
becomes aware that he soon will be able to land him. To accelerate
the catastrophe in the present case, Lady Ashton had recourse to an
expedient very consistent with the temper and credulity of those times,
but which the reader will probably pronounce truly detestable and
diabolical.