d and in absence. In this she was
disappointed. The time, indeed, had long elapsed when an answer should
have been received from the continent. The faint ray of hope which still
glimmered in Lucy's mind was well nigh extinguished. But the idea never
forsook her that her letter might not have been duly forwarded. 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. In a
private interview with Miss Ashton, he was deeply moved by her distress,
and could not but admit the justice of her request to be permitted a
direct communication with Ravenswood upon the subject of their solemn
contract. When she urged to him the great uncertainty under which she
laboured whether her letter had been ever forwarded, the old man paced
the room with long steps, shook his grey head, rested repeatedly for a
space on his ivory-headed staff, and, after much hesitation, confessed
that he thought her doubts so reasonable that he would himself aid in
the removal of them.

"I cannot but opine, Miss Lucy," he said, "that your worshipful lady
mother hath in