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, being an officer in the Guards, found himself under the necessity of fixing his residence in London—a circumstance he much regretted, and would have gladly avoided; as, by subjecting his conduct to the immediate inspection of Sir Aubrey, it greatly militated against the design he had formed of keeping his marriage, as long as it was possible, a secret. To have disposed of himself for life, under age, in the bonds of matrimony, without having afforded his father the slightest intimation of the sacrifice—and that to an object, however transcendent her worth or dear to his affections, possessing neither friends nor fortune—taken from a remote obscurity—unknown to any—was an event, that, whenever his destiny should reveal, would most essentially tend, he was well persuaded, to the injury of his future fortune.

Unthinking as we have described De Brooke in so important an action of his life as marriage,