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 Colonel Stuart's history, which Miss Douglas could not explain, was simply that he had been as much attached to Mary Forrester as it was in his nature to be, and his peculiar talents for pleasing had not been exerted less successfully with her than they had in many other instances of which she knew nothing. He disguised his faults for a time, and when Mary discovered that he was extravagant, that he played, and that he was totally without religious principle, she found that the determination to give him up, which followed her discoveries, was accompanied by bitter feelings of regret. But Lord Beaufort was wrong in his assertion that she jilted Colonel Stuart on her accession to wealth. Their engagement was at an end some weeks before the unexpected death of a distant relation gave Miss Forrester her fortune. This circumstance added to the mortification which Colonel Stuart felt; and if he had not actually said that her sudden prosperity had induced her to change her mind, he had allowed it to be said by his friends. He was a popular man with men, and there were many of his partisans who made it their business on this occasion to talk of Miss Forrester as cold-hearted and capricious; and who, when they meant to go the extremist lengths of vituperation, accused her of being actually a saint. But this awful assertion was of course made in a low tone of horror, and mentioned only in strict confidence. Colonel Stuart for some time kept up an appearance of attachment and regret. Perhaps he thought it impossible that any woman whom he had condescended to love could give him up and forget him. But when the consistency of Miss Forrester's conduct convinced him that she was in earnest, he returned to his former courses, played higher, betted more, and flirted more determinedly with married women; and whether his love of Mary were really or not forgotten in the bottom of his heart, he met her in society with apparent indifference, and in general seemed to forget that they had ever been on