g ailed her.

Thus, as if fate seemed determined to inflame and increase the poor
child's malady and passion, all circumstances and all parties round
about her urged it on. Her mother encouraged and applauded it; and the
very words which Bows used in endeavouring to repress her flame only
augmented this unlucky fever. Pen was not wicked and a seducer: Pen was
high-minded in wishing to avoid her. Pen loved her: the good and the
great, the magnificent youth, with the chains of gold and the scented
auburn hair! And so he did: or so he would have loved her five years
back perhaps, before the world had hardened the ardent and reckless
boy--before he was ashamed of a foolish and imprudent passion, and
strangled it as poor women do their illicit children, not on account of
the crime, but of the shame, and from dread that the finger of the world
should point to them.

What respectable person in the world will not say he was quite right
to avoid a marriage with an ill-educated person of low degree, whose
relations a gentleman could not well acknowledge, and whose manners
would not become her new station?--and what philosopher would not tell
him that the best thing to do with these little passions if they spring
up, is to get rid of them, and let them pass over and cure them: that no
man dies about a woman or vice versa: and that one or the other
having found the impossibility of gratifying his or her desire in the
particular instance, must make the best of matters, forget each other,
look out elsewhere, and choose again? And yet, perhaps, there may be
something said on the other side. Perhaps Bows was right in admiring
that passion of Pen's, blind and unreasoning as it was, that made him
ready to stake his all for his love; perhaps if self-sacrifice is a
laudable virtue, mere worldly self-sacrifice is not very much to be
praised;--in fine, let this be a reserved point to be settled by the
individual moralist who chooses to debate it.

So much is certain, that with the experience of the world which Mr. Pen
now had, he would have laughed at and scouted the idea of marrying a
penniless girl out of a kitchen. And this point being fixed in his mind,
he was but doing his duty as an honest man, in crushing any unlucky
fondness which he might feel towards poor little Fanny.

So she waited and waited in hopes that Arthur would come. She waited for
a whole week, and it was at the end of that time that the poor little
creature heard fr