fare. If he could have fashioned her future life, and his
own too, in accordance with his own now existing wishes, I think he
would have arranged that neither of them should marry at all, and
that to him should be assigned the duty and care of being Clara's
protector,--with full permission to tell her his mind as often as he
pleased on the subject of Mrs. Askerton. Then he went in and wrote
a note to Mr. Green, the lawyer, desiring that the interest of the
fifteen hundred pounds for one year might be at once remitted to Miss
Amedroz. He knew that he ought to write to her himself immediately,
without loss of a post; but how was he to write while things were
in their present position? Were he now to condole with her on her
father's death, without any reference to the great Askerton iniquity,
he would thereby be condoning all that was past, and acknowledging
the truth and propriety of her arguments. And he would be doing even
worse than that. He would be cutting the ground absolutely from
beneath his own feet as regarded that escape from his engagement
which he was contemplating.

What a cold-hearted, ungenerous wretch he must have been! That
will be the verdict against him. But the verdict will be untrue.
Cold-hearted and ungenerous he was; but he was no wretch,--as men and
women are now-a-days called wretches. He was chilly hearted, but yet
quite capable of enough love to make him a good son, a good husband,
and a good father too. And though he was ungenerous from the nature
of his temperament, he was not close-fisted or over covetous. And he
was a just man, desirous of obtaining nothing that was not fairly his
own. But, in truth, the artists have been so much in the habit of
painting for us our friends' faces without any of those flaws and
blotches with which work and high living are apt to disfigure us,
that we turn in disgust from a portrait in which the roughnesses and
pimples are made apparent.

But it was essential that he should now do something, and before
he sat down to dinner he did show Clara's letter to his mother.
"Mother," he said, as he sat himself down in her little room
up-stairs;--and she knew well by the tone of his voice, and by
the mode of his address, that there was to be a solemn occasion,
and a serious deliberative council on the present existing family
difficulty,--"mother, of course I have intended to let you know what
is the nature of Clara's answer to my letter."

"I am glad there is to be