eart; and she's
so proud, she'd throw him off without a sigh, if she knew how things
stood."

"I believe you are right," said Mr. Fielden; "for truth is the best
policy, after all. Still, it's scarce my business to meddle; and if it
were not for Susan--Well, well, I must think of it, and pray Heaven to
direct me."

This conference suffices to explain to the reader the stage to which
the history of Lucretia had arrived. Willingly we pass over what it were
scarcely possible to describe,--her first shock at the fall from the
expectations of her life; fortune, rank, and what she valued more than
either, power, crushed at a blow. From the dark and sullen despair into
which she was first plunged, she was roused into hope, into something
like joy, by Mainwaring's letters. Never had they been so warm and so
tender; for the young man felt not only poignant remorse that he had
been the cause of her downfall (though she broke it to him with more
delicacy than might have been expected from the state of her feelings
and the hardness of her character), but he felt also imperiously
the obligations which her loss rendered more binding than ever. He
persuaded, he urged, he forced himself into affection; and probably
without a murmur of his heart, he would have gone with her to the altar,
and, once wedded, custom and duty would have strengthened the chain
imposed on himself, had it not been for Lucretia's fatal eagerness to
see him, to come up to London, where she induced him to meet her,--for
with her came Susan; and in Susan's averted face and trembling hand and
mute avoidance of his eye, he read all which the poor dissembler fancied
she concealed. But the die was cast, the union announced, the time
fixed, and day by day he came to the house, to leave it in anguish
and despair. A feeling they shared in common caused these two unhappy
persons to shun each other. Mainwaring rarely came into the usual
sitting-room of the family; and when he did so, chiefly in the evening,
Susan usually took refuge in her own room. If they met, it was by
accident, on the stairs, or at the sudden opening of a door; then not
only no word, but scarcely even a look was exchanged: neither had the
courage to face the other. Perhaps, of the two, this reserve weighed
most on Susan; perhaps she most yearned to break the silence,--for she
thought she divined the cause of Mainwaring's gloomy and mute constraint
in the upbraidings of his conscience, which might doub