ife,
With "D---your eyes! your money or your life!"

Don Juan.

Misfortunes are like the creations of Cadmus,--they destroy one another!
Roused from the torpor of mind occasioned by the loss of her lover at
the sudden illness of the squire, Lucy had no thought for herself, no
thought for any one, for anything but her father, till long after the
earth had closed over his remains. The very activity of the latter grief
was less dangerous than the quiet of the former; and when the first
keenness of sorrow passed away, and her mind gradually and mechanically
returned to the remembrance of Clifford, it was with an intensity less
strong, and less fatal to her health and happiness than before. She
thought it unnatural and criminal to allow anything else to grieve her,
while she had so sacred a grief as that of her loss; and her mind, once
aroused into resistance to passion, betrayed a native strength little to
have been expected from her apparent character. Sir William Brandon
lost no time in returning to town after the burial of his brother.
He insisted upon taking his niece with him; and, though with real
reluctance, she yielded to his wishes, and accompanied him. By the
squire's will, indeed, Sir William was appointed guardian to Lucy,
and she yet wanted more than a year of her majority. Brandon, with
a delicacy very uncommon to him where women (for he was a confirmed
woman-hater) were concerned, provided everything that he thought could
in any way conduce to her comfort. He ordered it to be understood in
his establishment that she was its mistress. He arranged and furnished,
according to what he imagined to be her taste, a suite of apartments
for her sole accommodation; a separate carriage and servants were
appropriated to her use; and he sought, by perpetual presents of books
or flowers or music, to occupy her thoughts, and atone for the solitude
to which his professional duties obliged him so constantly to consign
her. These attentions, which showed this strange man in a new light,
seemed to bring out many little latent amiabilities, which were usually
imbedded in the callosities of his rocky nature; and, even despite her
causes for grief and the deep melancholy which consumed her, Lucy was
touched with gratitude at kindness doubly soothing in one who, however
urbane and polished, was by no means addicted to the little attentions
that are considered so gratifying by women