After much consideration, she determined to solicit the recommendations of Mrs Douglas and the De Courcy family; and, until she could avail herself of these, to subsist, in some obscure lodging, by the labour of her hands. In the meantime, it was necessary to remove immediately from her present abode. The day following was the last when she could claim any right to remain there; and she proceeded to make preparations for her departure. With a bleeding heart she began to arrange whatever had belonged to Montreville; and paused, with floods of tears, upon every relic now become so sacred. She entered his closet. His was the last foot that had pressed the threshold. His chair stood as he had risen from it. On the ground lay the cushion yet impressed with his knees--his Bible was open as he had left it. One passage was blistered with his tears; and there Laura read with emotions unutterable--'Leave to me thy fatherless children, and I will preserve them alive.' Her recent wounds thus torn open, with agony which could not be restrained, she threw herself upon the ground; and, with cries of anguish, besought her father to return but for one short hour to comfort his desolate child. 'Oh I shall never, never see him more,' said she,--'all my cries are vain,'--and she wept the more because they were in vain. Soon, however, she reproached herself with her immoderate sorrow, soon mingled its accents with those of humble resignation; and the vigorous mind recovering in devotion all its virtuous energy, she returned, with restored composure, to her melancholy labours. In her father's writing desk she found an unfinished letter. It began 'My dear De Courcy,'--and Laura was going to read it with the awe of one who listens to the last words of a father, when she remembered having surprised her father while writing it, and his having hastily concealed it from her sight. She instantly folded it without further acquaintance with its contents, except that her own name caught her eye. Continuing to arrange the papers, she observed a letter addressed to herself in a hand which she did not remember to have seen. It was Lady Pelham's answer to that in which Laura had announced her mother's death. She perceived that it might furnish an introduction to her aunt; and with a sensation of gratitude she remembered that she had been accidentally prevented from destroying it.