eems so much like
contempt. But if you knew what an effort has enabled me to tame
down my language, to curb my thoughts, to prevent me from embodying
that which now makes my brain whirl, and my hand feel as if the
living fire consumed it; if you knew what has enabled me to triumph
over the madness at my heart, and spare you what, if writ or spoken,
would seem like the ravings of insanity, you would not and you could
not despise me, though you might abhor.

And now Heaven guard and bless you! Nothing on earth could injure
you. And even the wicked who have looked upon you learn to pray,--I
have prayed for you!

Thus, abrupt and signatureless, ended the expected letter. Lucy came
down the next morning at her usual hour, and, except that she was
very pale, nothing in her appearance seemed to announce past grief or
emotion. The squire asked her if she had received the promised letter.
She answered, in a clear though faint voice, that she had,--that Mr.
Clifford had confessed himself of too low an origin to hope for marriage
with Mr. Brandon's family; that she trusted the squire would keep his
secret; and that the subject might never again be alluded to by
either. If in this speech there was something alien to Lucy's ingenuous
character, and painful to her mind, she felt it as it were a duty to
her former lover not to betray the whole of that confession so bitterly
wrung from him. Perhaps, too, there was in that letter a charm which
seemed to her too sacred to be revealed to any one; and mysteries were
not excluded even from a love so ill-placed and seemingly so transitory
as hers.

Lucy's answer touched the squire in his weak point. "A man of
decidedly low origin," he confessed, "was utterly out of the question;
nevertheless, the young man showed a great deal of candour in his
disclosure." He readily promised never to broach a subject necessarily
so unpleasant; and though he sighed as he finished his speech, yet the
extreme quiet of Lucy's manner reassured him; and when he perceived that
she resumed, though languidly, her wonted avocations, he felt but little
doubt of her soon overcoming the remembrance of what he hoped was but a
girlish and fleeting fancy. He yielded, with avidity, to her proposal
to return to Warlock; and in the same week as that in which Lucy
had received her lover's mysterious letter, the father and daughter
commenced their journey home.

CH