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Rh all she deemed superfluous in her wardrobe, not merely to the destitution of its ornamental, but also its useful contents. Even her husband's army allowance had been finally resorted to, and advanced by his agent for the purpose of defraying the hire of their apartments; and, to add to their distresses, she had been under the necessity of renouncing the comforts of a second chamber, to yield it to the claims of another, and confine herself wholly to that one which had become the dark abode of poverty, disease, and misery! There, meagre, pale, and wasted, her beloved husband and son represented every moment to her afflicted view the awful picture of mortality.

"Oh, could Sir Aubrey now behold his son!" burst from her lips, "and that young drooping flower, his unoffending grandson!"

Often she had been tempted to write to him, to make a strong and pathetic appeal to his feelings as a father; but as often the risings of indignation and the intolerable sense of unmerited insult, as felt in the person of her husband, had hitherto restrained her. Dishonoured and slighted, spurned and disowned as De Brooke had been, and all for her sake, was she to risk by repeated humiliations a renewal of indignity; or could she hope, even by a faithful delineation of the present scene, to