Page:Lady Anne Granard 2.pdf/247

Rh, rotting, at my park-gates, shall you have a penny from my porter." "You are very angry, and talk very wildly, Lady Rotheles. If Emma Aubrey writes to me in a proper manner, she will not be refused help." The words "writes to me," in a single moment arrested all the fury in the angry woman's breast. "Should she write to her lord, what might she not unfold;" and she saw in an instant how much mischief she must have done in mentioning the affair of Lord Allerton's marriage, since her lord could not fail to know that if she did not assist her niece, she connived at her conduct, to the injury of his sister and his niece. No man less merited such conduct from his wife than Lord Rotheles, for he had been both generous and confiding to an extreme in her case, and deceit was abhorrent to his nature. Unfortified by sound principles, unblessed by parental control, his morals had been lax, and his passions strong, but his disposition was kind and considerate, and the heart, too subject to melt in the eye of beauty, yielded also to the voice of pity. His sins were allied to the heart's tendernesses, not the cruelties which so frequently accompany them; he was rather seduced than the seducer, and there had never been a period in his eventful and unhappy history, when a sensible and good woman might not have rendered him a respectable member of society; but his first step had been wrong, and in