d be in your gentle breast one causeless
ground of quarrel with him. You should know, and you will see, that he
was in no fault here.'

There appeared something so very candid, so scrupulously honourable,
so very truthful and just in this course something which rendered the
upright person who resorted to it, so worthy of belief--that Emma's
heart, for the first time, sunk within her. She turned away and burst
into tears.

'I would,' said Mr Chester, leaning over her, and speaking in mild and
quite venerable accents; 'I would, dear girl, it were my task to banish,
not increase, those tokens of your grief. My son, my erring son,--I will
not call him deliberately criminal in this, for men so young, who have
been inconstant twice or thrice before, act without reflection, almost
without a knowledge of the wrong they do,--will break his plighted faith
to you; has broken it even now. Shall I stop here, and having given you
this warning, leave it to be fulfilled; or shall I go on?'

'You will go on, sir,' she answered, 'and speak more plainly yet, in
justice both to him and me.'

'My dear girl,' said Mr Chester, bending over her more affectionately
still; 'whom I would call my daughter, but the Fates forbid, Edward
seeks to break with you upon a false and most unwarrantable pretence. I
have it on his own showing; in his own hand. Forgive me, if I have had
a watch upon his conduct; I am his father; I had a regard for your peace
and his honour, and no better resource was left me. There lies on his
desk at this present moment, ready for transmission to you, a letter,
in which he tells you that our poverty--our poverty; his and mine, Miss
Haredale--forbids him to pursue his claim upon your hand; in which he
offers, voluntarily proposes, to free you from your pledge; and talks
magnanimously (men do so, very commonly, in such cases) of being in
time more worthy of your regard--and so forth. A letter, to be plain, in
which he not only jilts you--pardon the word; I would summon to your
aid your pride and dignity--not only jilts you, I fear, in favour of the
object whose slighting treatment first inspired his brief passion for
yourself and gave it birth in wounded vanity, but affects to make a
merit and a virtue of the act.'

She glanced proudly at him once more, as by an involuntary impulse, and
with a swelling breast rejoined, 'If what you say be true, he takes much
needless trouble, sir, to compass his design. He's very tender o