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 by quoting more of Lady Margaret's prolix epistle. Suffice it to say, that it closed by laying her commands on her grandchild to consent to the solemnization of her marriage without loss of time.

"I never thought till this instant," said Edith, dropping the letter from her hand, "that Lord Evandale would have acted ungenerously."

"Ungenerously, Edith?" replied her lover. "And how can you apply such a term to my desire to call you mine, ere I part from you perhaps for ever?"

"Lord Evandale ought to have remembered," said Edith, "that when his perseverance, and, I must add, a due sense of his merit and of the obligations we owed him, wrung from me a slow consent that I would one day comply with his wishes, I made it my condition, that I should not be pressed to a hasty accomplishment of my promise; and now he avails himself of his interest with my only remaining relative, to hurry me with precipitate and