nothing of running across to Belton, if you
would receive me at your house. I could come very well
before harvest, if that would suit you, and would stay
with you for a week. Pray give my kindest regards to my
cousin Clara, whom I can only just remember as a very
little girl. She was with her aunt at Perivale when I was
at Belton as a boy. She shall find a friend in me if she
wants a friend.

Your affectionate cousin,

W. BELTON.

Clara read the letter very slowly, so that she might make herself
sure of its tone and bearing before she was called upon by her
father to express her feeling respecting it. She knew that she would
be expected to abuse it violently, and to accuse the writer of
vulgarity, insolence, and cruelty; but she had already learned that
she must not allow herself to accede to all her father's fantasies.
For his sake, and for his protection, it was necessary that she
should differ from him, and even contradict him. Were she not to do
so, he would fall into a state of wailing and complaining that would
exaggerate itself almost to idiotcy. And it was imperative that
she herself should exercise her own opinion on many points, almost
without reference to him. She alone knew how utterly destitute she
would be when he should die. He, in the first days of his agony, had
sobbed forth his remorse as to her ruin; but, even when doing so,
he had comforted himself with the remembrance of Mrs. Winterfield's
money, and Mrs. Winterfield's affection for his daughter. And the
aunt, when she had declared her purpose to Clara, had told herself
that the provision made for Clara by her father was sufficient. To
neither of them had Clara told her own position. She could not inform
her aunt that her father had given up to the poor reprobate who had
destroyed himself all that had been intended for her. Had she done so
she would have been asking her aunt for charity. Nor would she bring
herself to add to her father's misery, by destroying the hopes which
still supported him. She never spoke of her own position in regard
to money, but she knew that it had become her duty to live a wary,
watchful life, taking much upon herself in their impoverished
household, and holding her own opinion against her father's when her
doing so became expedient. So she finished the letter in silence, and
did not speak at the moment when the movement of her eyes declared
that she had completed the task.

"Well," sa