Page:Lady Anne Granard, or Keeping up Appearances Volume 2.pdf/13

Rh shall manage," said Lady Anne; "the brute cannot arrest me!" With these words, which were only half uttered, but heard distinctly by the young and excited ears of her daughters, Lady Anne flew down stairs. The poor girls, deeply interested and alarmed in these few moments, had entirely changed the object of their fears and feelings. Their mother's words had awoke a new current of thought, a new subject of terror. Mamma arrested, dragged to prison, confined to a subterranean dungeon, starved, and probably murdered, whilst disgrace, as infectious and fatal as the plague, burying all the hopes and prospects of their lives, all the fond affections and expectations of their hearts, rose simultaneously before them, and alike forgetting their own sorrows in hers, who was, at all events, their mother, they simultaneously uttered the words, "Poor mamma!" dropt into each other's arms, and burst into a flood of tears. For such daughters as these was the world, with its idle vanities, its real inflictions, and unreal pleasures, preferred. But we will not stay to moralize, for surely "he who runs may read." The time came when they ceased to cry and began to think; by the way, if Georgiana had not, from a concurrence of circumstances, been enabled to eat her breakfast, this operation of the mind could not have been engaged in without further injury, for she was, indeed, weak and exhausted; but having no actual