"I!" said Brandon, deeply affected; and passing round the bed, he took his niece in his arms: "I will be your father, Lucy, and you--the last of our race--shall be to me as a daughter!" CHAPTER XXV. Falsehood in him was not the useless lie Of boasting pride or laughing vanity: It was the gainful, the persuading art, etc. CRABBE. On with the horses--off to Canterbury, Tramp, tramp o'er pebble, and splash, splash thro' puddle; Hurrah! how swiftly speeds the post so merry! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "Here laws are all inviolate: none lay Traps for the traveller; every highway's clear; Here--" he was interrupted by a knife, With "D---your eyes! your money or your life!" Don Juan. Misfortunes are like the creations of Cadmus,--they destroy one another! Roused from the torpor of mind occasioned by the loss of her lover at the sudden illness of the squire, Lucy had no thought for herself, no thought for any one, for anything but her father, till long after the earth had closed over his remains. The very activity of the latter grief was less dangerous than the quiet of the former; and when the first keenness of sorrow passed away, and her mind gradually and mechanically returned to the remembrance of Clifford, it was with an intensity less strong, and less fatal to her health and happiness than before. She thought it unnatural and criminal to allow anything else to grieve her, while she had so sacred a grief as that of her loss; and her mind, once aroused into resistance to passion, betrayed a native strength little to have been expected from her apparent character. Sir William Brandon lost no time in returning to town after the burial of his brother. He insisted upon taking his niece with him; and, though with real reluctance, she yielded to his wishes, and accompanied him. By the squire's will, indeed, Sir William was appointed guardian to Lucy, and she yet wanted more than a year of her majority. Brandon, with a delicacy very uncommon to him where women (for he was a confirmed woman-hater) were concerned, provided everything that he thought could in any way conduce to her comfort. He ordered it to be understood in his establishment that she was its mistress. He arranged and furnished, according to what he imagined to be her taste, a suite of apartments for her sole accommodation; a separate carriage and servants were appropriated to her use; and he sought, by perpetual presents of books or flowers or music, to occupy her thoughts, and atone for the solitude to which his professional duties obliged him so constantly to consign her. These attentions, which showed this strange man in a new light, seemed to bring out many little latent amiabilities, which were usually imbedded in the