s irrevocably yours."

The plea of anxious distress revived all the tenderness of Isabel; and
he whom, she believed, she could reject as the heir of a coronet, and
the favourite of an Usurper, became the object of inviolable attachment
when viewed as an outcast, seeking an asylum from the misfortunes
brought on him by the crimes of his parents. Considering it to be her
duty, she explained his situation to her uncle and aunt, and they agreed
that it would be inhuman to deny him the refuge he craved. But still, as
he was at present rather a probationary than an assured penitent, and in
some points of view an object of suspicion, Dr. Beaumont felt it would
be endangering his own security to converse with him freely on political
topics. Still more hazardous would it be to admit him to a participation
of their family-secrets, and at this time there was one which engrossed
their minds, and threw an unusual air of mystery and anxious solicitude
into Isabel's behaviour.

[1] Especially Bishop Sanderson.

CHAP. XVII.

To her direct thy looks; there fix thy praise,
And gaze with wonder there. The life I gave her
Oh! she has used it for the noblest ends!
To fill each duty; make her father feel
The purest joy, the heart dissolving bliss,
To have a grateful child.

Murphy.

The manners of Isabel were peculiarly frank and playful; the
consciousness that her life was spent in the discharge of active duty,
gave the same energy to her mind, which bodily exertion did to her
nervous system. She never acted under the influence of motives which
required disguise; the simplicity of her habits, her ignorance of the
world, and innocence of intention, gave such an undesigning engaging
character to her conversation, that whoever spoke to her, might think
themselves addressing one of those pure intelligences, who are incapable
of falsehood or disguise. To a mind so modelled, a secret was a dreadful
burden, especially when compelled to hide it from one, whom love induced
her to treat with peculiar confidence, and who often complained of her
reserve, and asked the meaning of those embarrassed looks, that
impatience to break from him, and those thousand mysterious contrivances
upon petty occasions, which were so new to her character, and might have
awakened jealousy in the most unsuspicious heart.

On his being first domesticated in the Beaumont family, L