hall not sin again. This intrusion is my last. CECILE DE LA MERONVILLE.

These letters will probably suffice to clear up that part of Clarence's
history which had not hitherto been touched upon; they will show that
Talbot's will (after several legacies to his old servants, his nearest
connections, and two charitable institutions, which he had founded, and
for some years supported) had bequeathed the bulk of his property
to Clarence. The words in which the bequest was made were kind, and
somewhat remarkable. "To my relation and friend, commonly known by
the name of Clarence Linden, to whom I am bound alike by blood and
affection," etc. These expressions, joined to the magnitude of the
bequest, the apparently unaccountable attachment of the old man to
his heir, and the mystery which wrapped the origin of the latter,
all concurred to give rise to an opinion, easily received, and soon
universally accredited, that Clarence was a natural son of the deceased;
and so strong in England is the aristocratic aversion to an unknown
lineage, that this belief, unflattering as it was, procured for Linden
a much higher consideration, on the score of birth, than he might
otherwise have enjoyed. Furthermore will the above correspondence
testify the general eclat of Madame la Meronville's attachment, and the
construction naturally put upon it. Nor do we see much left for us to
explain, with regard to the Frenchwoman herself, which cannot equally
well be gleaned by any judicious and intelligent reader, from the
epistle last honoured by his perusal. Clarence's sense of gallantry did,
indeed, smite him severely, for his negligence and ill requital to one
who, whatever her faults or follies, had at least done nothing with
which he had a right to reproach her. It must however, be considered
in his defence that the fatal event which had so lately occurred, the
relapse which Clarence had suffered in consequence, and the melancholy
confusion and bustle in which the last week or ten days had been passed,
were quite sufficient to banish her from his remembrance. Still she was
a woman, and had loved, or seemed to love; and Clarence, as he wrote to
her a long, kind, and almost brotherly letter, in return for her own,
felt that, in giving pain to another, one often suffers almost as much
for avoiding as for committing a sin.

We have said his letter was kind; it was also frank, and yet prudent. In
it he said that he had long loved another, wh