e sure
that I will, if I can have but one second. However, that is not at all
likely, until we see what the consequences of her crime will be: And who
can tell that?--She may--How can I speak it, and my once darling daughter
unmarried?--She may be with child!--This would perpetuate her stain. Her
brother may come to some harm; which God forbid!--One child's ruin, I
hope, will not be followed by another's murder!

As to her grief, and her present misery, whatever it be, she must bear
with it; and it must be short of what I hourly bear for her! Indeed I am
afraid nothing but her being at the last extremity of all will make her
father, and her uncles, and her other friends, forgive her.

The easy pardon perverse children meet with, when they have done the
rashest and most rebellious thing they can do, is the reason (as is
pleaded to us every day) that so may follow their example. They depend
upon the indulgent weakness of their parents' tempers, and, in that
dependence, harden their own hearts: and a little humiliation, when they
have brought themselves into the foretold misery, is to be a sufficient
atonement for the greatest perverseness.

But for such a child as this [I mention what others hourly say, but what
I must sorrowfully subscribe to] to lay plots and stratagems to deceive
her parents as well as herself! and to run away with a libertine! Can
there be any atonement for her crime? And is she not answerable to God,
to us, to you, and to all the world who knew her, for the abuse of such
talents as she has abused?

You say her heart is half-broken: Is it to be wondered at? Was not her
sin committed equally against warning and the light of her own knowledge?

That he would now marry her, or that she would refuse him, if she
believed him in earnest, as she has circumstanced herself, is not at all
probable; and were I inclined to believe it, nobody else here would. He
values not his relations; and would deceive them as soon as any others:
his aversion to marriage he has always openly declared; and still
occasionally declares it. But, if he be now in earnest, which every one
who knows him must doubt, which do you think (hating us too as he
professes to hate and despise us all) would be most eligible here, To
hear of her death, or of her marriage to such a vile man?

To all of us, yet, I cannot say! For, O my good Mrs. Norton, you know
what a mother's tenderness for the child of her heart would make her
cho