to the next room, I will dress myself, and attend you
immediately."

Mrs. Hammond began to be equally aware that her struggles were to no
purpose; but she could not be equally patient. At one moment she raved
upon the brutality of Mr. Tyrrel, whom she affirmed to be a devil
incarnate, and not a man. At another she expostulated, with bitter
invective, against the hardheartedness of the bailiff, and exhorted him
to mix some humanity and moderation with the discharge of his function;
but he was impenetrable to all she could urge. In the mean while Emily
yielded with the sweetest resignation to an inevitable evil. Mrs.
Hammond insisted that, at least, they should permit her to attend her
young lady in the chaise; and the bailiff, though the orders he had
received were so peremptory that he dared not exercise his discretion as
to the execution of the writ, began to have some apprehensions of
danger, and was willing to admit of any precaution that was not in
direct hostility to his functions. For the rest he understood, that it
was in all cases dangerous to allow sickness, or apparent unfitness for
removal, as a sufficient cause to interrupt a direct process; and that,
accordingly, in all doubtful questions and presumptive murders, the
practice of the law inclined, with a laudable partiality, to the
vindication of its own officers. In addition to these general rules, he
was influenced by the positive injunctions and assurances of Swineard,
and the terror which, through a circle of many miles, was annexed to the
name of Tyrrel. Before they departed, Mrs. Hammond despatched a
messenger with a letter of three lines to Mr. Falkland, informing him of
this extraordinary event. Mr. Falkland was from home when the messenger
arrived, and not expected to return till the second day; accident seemed
in this instance to favour the vengeance of Mr. Tyrrel, for he had
himself been too much under the dominion of an uncontrollable fury, to
take a circumstance of this sort into his estimate.

The forlorn state of these poor women, who were conducted, the one by
compulsion, the other a volunteer, to a scene so little adapted to their
accommodation as that of a common jail, may easily be imagined Mrs.
Hammond, however, was endowed with a masculine courage and impetuosity
of spirit, eminently necessary in the difficulties they had to
encounter. She was in some degree fitted by a sanguine temper, and an
impassioned sense of injustice, for the dis