portion of the lady's property--that
portion that she loved best. The very idea of parting with it at all, of
being forced to give it up, was most painful and distressing to her. Yet
that made no difference whatever in her feelings towards Mr. Marlow.
Communications of various kinds took place between lawyers, and the
opposite counsel were as firm as a rock. Mrs. Hazleton thought it very
hard, very unjust, very wrong; but that changed not in the least her
feelings towards Mr. Marlow. Nay more, with that delicate art of
combination in which ladies are formed to excel, she conceived and
manipulated with great dexterity a scheme for bringing herself and Mr.
Marlow into frequent personal communication, and for causing somebody to
suggest to him a marriage with her own beautiful self, as the best mode
of settling the disputed claim.

O those fine and delicate threads of intrigue, how frail they are, and
how much depends upon every one of them, be it in the warp or the woof
of a scheme! We have seen that in this case, one of them gave way under
the rough handling of Sir Philip Hastings, and the whole fabric was in
imminent danger of running down and becoming nothing but a raveled
skein. Mrs. Hazleton was resolved that it should not be so, and now she
was busily engaged in the attempt to knot together the broken thread,
and to lay all the others straight and in right order again. This was
the secret of the whole matter.

She exerted all her charms, and could Waller but have seen her we should
have had such an account of the artillery of her eyes, the insidious
attack of her smile, and the whole host of powerful adversaries brought
to bear against the object of her assault in her gracefully moving form
and heaving bosom, that Saccharissa would have melted away like a wet
lump of sugar in the comparison.

Then again when she had produced an effect, and saw clear and distinctly
that he thought her lovely, and very charming too, she seemed to fall
into a pleasant sort of languid melancholy, which was even more charming
still. The brook was bubbling and murmuring at their feet, dashing clear
and bright over its stony bed, and changing the brown rock, the water
weed, or the leaf beneath, into gems by the magic of its own brightness.
The boughs were waving over head, covered with many-colored foliage, and
the sun, glancing through, not only enriched the tints above, but
checkered the mossy path along which they wandered like a che