isited
her every day during the rest of her short life: I was with her in her
last moments."

Again he stopped to recover himself; and Elinor spoke her feelings in
an exclamation of tender concern, at the fate of his unfortunate
friend.

"Your sister, I hope, cannot be offended," said he, "by the
resemblance I have fancied between her and my poor disgraced relation.
Their fates, their fortunes, cannot be the same; and had the natural
sweet disposition of the one been guarded by a firmer mind, or a
happier marriage, she might have been all that you will live to see
the other be. But to what does all this lead? I seem to have been
distressing you for nothing. Ah! Miss Dashwood--a subject such as
this--untouched for fourteen years--it is dangerous to handle it at
all! I _will_ be more collected--more concise. She left to my care her
only child, a little girl, the offspring of her first guilty
connection, who was then about three years old. She loved the child,
and had always kept it with her. It was a valued, a precious trust to
me; and gladly would I have discharged it in the strictest sense, by
watching over her education myself, had the nature of our situations
allowed it; but I had no family, no home; and my little Eliza was
therefore placed at school. I saw her there whenever I could, and
after the death of my brother, (which happened about five years ago,
and which left to me the possession of the family property,) she
visited me at Delaford. I called her a distant relation; but I am
well aware that I have in general been suspected of a much nearer
connection with her. It is now three years ago (she had just reached
her fourteenth year,) that I removed her from school, to place her
under the care of a very respectable woman, residing in Dorsetshire,
who had the charge of four or five other girls of about the same time
of life; and for two years I had every reason to be pleased with her
situation. But last February, almost a twelvemonth back, she suddenly
disappeared. I had allowed her, (imprudently, as it has since turned
out,) at her earnest desire, to go to Bath with one of her young
friends, who was attending her father there for his health. I knew him
to be a very good sort of man, and I thought well of his
daughter--better than she deserved, for, with a most obstinate and
ill-judged secrecy, she would tell nothing, would give no clue, though
she certainly knew all. He, her father, a well-meaning, but not a
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