The servants were summoned—medical aid was called in—but it was all too late! and the wretched parents were doomed to mourn their loved, their lost Maria! George, her fond and affectionate brother, who was at Oxford, hastened from all the academic honours which were awaiting him, to follow to the grave his beloved sister. The effect upon Frederick Langdale was most dreadful: it was supposed he would never recover from a shock so great, and at the moment so unexpected; for, although the delicacy of her constitution was a perpetual source of uneasiness and solicitude, still the immediate symptoms had taken rather a favourable turn during the last few days of her life, and had re-invigorated the hopes which those who so dearly loved her entertained of her eventual recovery. Of this distressed young man I never indeed heard anything, till about three years after, when I saw it announced in the papers that he was just married to the only daughter of a rich west-country baronet, which event, if wanted to work another proverb here, would afford me a most admirable opportunity of doing so. The death of poor Maria, and the dread which her father entertained of the third visitation of Martha, made a complete change in the affairs of the family. By the exertion of powerful interest, he obtained an appointment for his son to act as his deputy in the office which he held, and having achieved this desired object, resolved on leaving England for a time, and quitting a neighbourhood in which he must be perpetually exposed to the danger which he was now perfectly convinced was inseparable from his next interview with the weird woman. George, of course, thus checked in his classical pursuits, left Oxford, and at the early age of nineteen commenced active official life, not certainly in the particular department which his mother had selected for his _debût_; and it was somewhat observable, that the Langdales, after the death of Maria, not only abstained from frequent intercourse with the Hardings during their stay in England, but that the mighty professions of the purse-proud citizen dwindled by degrees into an absolute forgetfulness of any promise, even conditional, to exert an interest for their son. Seeing this, Mr. Harding felt that he should act prudentially, by endeavouring to place his son where in the course of time, he might perhaps attain to that situation, from whose honourable revenue he could live like a gentleman, and ‘settle comfortably.’