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598 line, pouring out her wrongs, and without seeming sensible that Caroline had been wronged too, expressing her fear that her father might believe her an accomplice in Jasper's plot, and refuse her the means to live apart from the wretch, upon whom she heaped every epithet that just indignation could suggest to a feeble mind.

The latter part of the letter, blurred and blotted, was incoherent, almost raving. In fact, Matilda was then seized by the mortal illness which hurried her to the grave. To the Marquis much of this letter was extremely uninteresting—much of it quite incomprehensible. He could not see why it should so overpoweringly affect his wife. Only those passages which denounced a scheme to frustrate some marriage meditated by Mr. Darrell made him somewhat uneasy, and appeared to him to demand explanation. But Caroline, in the anguish to which she awakened, forestalled his inquiries. To her but two thoughts were present—how she had wronged Darrell—how ungrateful and faithless she must seem to him; and in the impulse of her remorse, and in the child-like candor of her soul, artlessly, ingeniously she poured out her feelings to the husband she had taken as counsellor and guide, as if seeking to guard all her sorrow for the past from a sentiment that might render her less loyal to the responsibilities which linked her future to another's. A man of sense would have hailed, in so noble a confidence (however it might have pained him for the time), a guarantee for the happiness and security of his whole existence. He would have seen how distinct from that ardent love which, in Caroline's new relation of life, would have bordered upon guilt, and been cautious as guilt against disclosing its secrets, was the infantine, venerating affection she had felt for a man so far removed from her by years and the development of intellect—an affection which a young husband, trusted with every thought, every feeling, might reasonably hope to eclipse. A little forbearance, a little of delicate and generous tenderness, at that moment, would have secured to Lord Montfort the warm devotion of a grateful heart, in which the grief that overflowed was not for the irreplaceable loss of an earlier lover, but the repentant shame for wrong and treachery to a confiding friend.

But it is in vain to ask from any man that which is not in him! Lord Montfort listened with sullen, stolid displeasure. That Caroline should feel the slightest pain at any cause which had cancelled her engagement to that odious Darrell, and had raised her to the rank of his marchioness, was a crime in his eyes never to be expiated. He considered, not without reason, that