'Very wonderful personage!' cried Sir Jaspar, his air mingling reverence with amazement; 'and what,—unfold to me, I beg, what is the necromancy through which you support, under such toils, your intellectual dignity? and strangle, in its birth, every struggle of false shame?'
'Alas, Sir, I have seen guilt!—Since then, I have thought that shame belonged to nothing else!'
The eyes of Sir Jaspar were now suffused with tender admiration. 'Fair deity of the counter!' he cried, 'you are sublime! And she, too,—your witching little handmaid; by what kind, dulcet chance,—new in the annals of misfortune,—have two such wonders met?—'
'Ah, rather, Sir,—since you couple us so kindly,—rather ask by what adverse chance we have so long been separated?'
'You have known her, then, some time?'
'We were brought up together!—the same convent, the same governess, the same instructors, were common to both till my marriage. And now, again,—as before that period,—I have not the most distant idea of any possible happiness, that is not annexed to her presence.'
Touched to hear the word happiness once again, even though with such sadness, pronounced by Gabriella; yet alarmed at a discourse that might lead, inadvertently, to some secret history, Juliet was returning, to stop any further detail; when, upon Sir Jaspar's answering, 'Sweet couple! Lord Denmeath, who ought at least, if I understand right,—to take care of one of you will surely make it his business that you should coo together in the same cage?'—she again retreated, anxious to learn what this meant, and hoping that he would become more explicit.
'Lord Denmeath?' repeated Gabriella, 'If you know Lord Denmeath you may be better informed upon this subject than I am myself. Was it at Brighthelmstone that you met with his lordship?'
'It was at Brighthelmstone that I heard of him; and heard that, though wary of speech, he has been incautious in manner, and left little doubt upon the minds of his observers, that this fair flower springs from the same stock as some part of his own family; though she may be one of those sweet, but hapless buds, whose innocence pays for the guilt of its planter.—'
'No, Sir, no!' Gabriella precipitately interrupted him; 'the birth of my friend is unstained, though unequal; the marriage of her parents was legal, though secret. Her mother came not, indeed, from an ancient race; but she was a pattern of virtue, as well as a model of beauty. Could it, indeed, be believed, that a young nobleman of such expectations, in every way, as those of the Earl of Melbury's only son, Lord Granville, would have given his hand to the orphan and destitute daughter of an insolvent man of business, had she not possessed every advantage, nay, every perfection to which human nature can rise?'