ns of our blinded
hearts. Ingratitude, unkindness, calumny, are permitted to assail us
by the same power who cuts off 'the desire of our eyes at a stroke.'
The friend who betrays us, and the daughter who deceives us, are
instruments for our chastisement, sent by the same purifying hand
who orders a fit of sickness to weaken our bodies, or a storm to
destroy our crop, or a fire to burn down our house. And we must look
for the same remedy in the one case as in the other; I mean prayer
and a deep submission to the will of God. We must leave off looking
at second causes, and look more at Him who sets them in action. We
must try to find out the meaning of the Providence, and hardly dare
pray to be delivered from it till it has accomplished in us the end
for which it was sent."

His imprudent daughter Bragwell would not be brought to see or
forgive, nor was the degrading name of Mrs. Incle ever allowed to be
pronounced in his hearing. He had loved her with an excessive and
undue affection, and while she gratified his vanity by her beauty
and finery, he deemed her faults of little consequence; but when she
disappointed his ambition by a disgraceful marriage, all his natural
affection only served to increase his resentment. Yet, though he
regretted her crime less than his own mortification, he never ceased
in secret to lament her loss. She soon found out she was undone, and
wrote in a strain of bitter repentance to ask him for forgiveness.
She owned that her husband, whom she had supposed to be a man of
fashion in disguise, was a low person in distressed circumstances.
She implored that her father, though he refused to give her husband
that fortune for which alone it was now too plain he married her,
would at least allow her some subsistence; for that Mr. Incle was
much in debt, and, she feared, in danger of a jail.

The father's heart was half melted at this account, and his
affection was for a time awakened; but Mrs. Bragwell opposed his
sending her any assistance. She always made it a point of duty never
to forgive; for, she said, it only encouraged those who had done
wrong once to do worse next time. For her part she had never yet
been guilty of so mean and pitiful a weakness as to forgive any one;
for to pardon an injury always showed either want of spirit to feel
it, or want of power to resent it. She was resolved she would never
squander the money for which she worked early and late, on a baggage
who had thrown hersel