Page:Lady Anne Granard 2.pdf/98

96 "You see me, Margaret," said she, "and you are satisfied; much as your pity may be moved and your sympathy awakened, you know that the woman so soon to resign existence, the child of error and weakness so soon to stand before her God, meditates no harm to you, or would for a single moment draw your husband from his allegiance. No, no; far rather would she strengthen the bonds which bind you, and which alone can bestow on your husband the wife of which he was so cruelly deprived, under impressions as blameless as they were deplorable in their inflictions." "Surely," said Isabella, eagerly, and totally forgetting herself in her sympathies, "there are bounds to our duties even to our parents;—if your religious sentiments resembled your father's, and were more liberal than my aunt's, ought you not to have rewarded poor Glentworth, even at the risk of disobeying your mother? My dear sister, Louisa, ventured to do this, and is happy; my mamma was soon reconciled, and." "Your mamma, so far as I could ever hear, is a different woman to mine; she was all tenderness, all goodness; her scruples were high and holy ones, and she so nearly persuaded me that she was right, I believed myself wrong in all that remained deficient in my conviction. A near approach to the grave makes me doubt my own judgment, and in one sense confirms hers. As the wife of Glentworth, I should