pleasing, but who also habitually exercised it. From custom,
inclination, policy, they were very kind to the mother and daughter;
probably paying the latter many compliments which they would never have
uttered had they been single men. Coming from an unmarried man the
speech is often significant of love, which on the lips of a husband is
but the language of courtesy. But, unfortunately, Miss ('Mistress' is
her style in the report of a famous trial) Sarah Stout fell madly in
love with Spencer Cowper notwithstanding the impossibility of marriage.

Not only did she conceive a dangerous fondness for him, but she openly
expressed it--by speech and letters. She visited him in the Temple, and
persecuted him with her embarrassing devotion whenever he came to
Hertford. It was a trying position for a young man not thirty years of
age, with a wife to whom he was devotedly attached, and a family whose
political influence in his native town might be hurt by publication of
the girl's folly. Taking his elder brother into his confidence, he asked
what course he ought to pursue. To withdraw totally and abruptly from
the two ladies, would be cruel to the daughter, insulting to the mother;
moreover, it would give rise to unpleasant suspicions and prejudicial
gossip in the borough. It was decided that Spencer must repress the
girl's advances--must see her loss frequently--and, by a reserved and
frigid manner, must compel her to assume an appearance of womanly
discretion. But the plan failed.

At the opening of the year 1699 she invited him to take up his quarters
in her mother's house, when he came to Hertford at the next Spring
Assizes. This invitation he declined, saying that he had arranged to
take his brother's customary lodgings in the house of Mr. Barefoot, in
the Market Place, but with manly consideration he promised to call upon
her. "I am glad," Sarah wrote to him on March 5, 1699, "you have not
quite forgot there is such a person as I in being: but I am willing to
shut my eyes and not see anything that looks like unkindness in you, and
rather content myself with what excuses you are pleased to make, than be
inquisitive into what I must not know: I am sure the winter has been too
unpleasant for me to desire the continuance of it: and I wish you were
to endure the sharpness of it but for one short hour, as I have done for
many long nights and days, and then I believe it would move that rocky
heart of yours that can be so thoughtl