All the more lamentable, then, effacement should
be, from social, moral or other seasons, required.--Yet for the family to
gain knowledge of certain facts without due preparation--how utterly
disastrous! Think of her half-sister, Harriet Cowden, for instance, with
a full-grown and, alas! wrong-way-about, step-nephew bounced on her out
of a clear sky, and on such an occasion too.--The bare notion of what
that formidable lady, not only might, but quite certainly would look and
say turned Miss Felicia positively faint.--No--no, clearly it had to
be--it had to be--or rather--she became incoherent--had not to be, if
only for dearest Charles's sake. Yet what a ten thousand pities; for
notwithstanding the plebeian origin on the mother's side, didn't
Faircloth--these reflections came later--really surpass every male Verity
present, young Tom included, though she confessed to a very soft spot in
her heart for young Tom?--Surpass them, just as her brother Charles had
always surpassed them in good looks and charm as in inches, above all in
his air of singular good-breeding? And how extraordinarily he had
transmitted this last to Faircloth, notwithstanding the--well, the
drawback, the obstacle to--Miss Felicia did not finish the sentence,
though in sentiment becoming sweetly abandoned. For how she would have
revelled, other things being equal--which they so deplorably weren't--in
shaking this singularly attractive nephew in the family's collective
face, just to show them what dearest Charles--who they never had quite
understood or appreciated--could do in the matter of sons, when he once
set about it, even against admittedly heavy odds!

As it was, she had to pacify her gentle extravagance by subjecting the
said nephew's hand to a long tremulous pressure at parting.--He, worn,
blanched, a little strange from the night's lonely and very searching
vigil; she patchily pink as to complexion, fluttered, her candid eyes
red-lidded.--Pacify herself by assuring him she could never express how
deeply she had felt his unselfish devotion during this time of
trouble--felt his--his perfect attitude towards her dearest brother--his
father--or the consideration he had shown towards Damaris and herself.

"You can count on my unswerving affection, my dear Darcy," she had
said. Adding with, to him, very touching humility--"And any affection
you have to give me in return I shall cherish most gratefully, be very
sure of that."

All which, as shall p