"Your friend!" pursued the oratorical lady, detaining Miss Warwick with a heavy hand: "Do you feel the force of the word? _Can_ you feel it, as I once thought you could? Your friend! am not _I_ your friend, your best friend, my Angelina? your own Araminta, your amiable Araminta, your _unknown friend?_" "My _unknown_ friend, indeed!" said Angelina. Miss Hodges let go her struggling hand, and Miss Warwick that instant followed Lady Frances, who, having effected her retreat, had by this time gained the staircase. "Gone!" cried Miss Hodges; "then never will I see or speak to her more. Thus I whistle her off, and let her down the wind to prey at fortune." "Gracious heart! what quarrels," said Nat, "and doings, the night before our wedding-day!" We leave this well-matched pair to their happy prospects of conjugal union and equality. Lady Frances, who perceived that Miss Warwick was scarcely able to support herself, led her to a sofa, which she luckily saw through the half-open door of a drawing-room, at the head of the staircase. "To be taken for a thief!--Oh, to what have I exposed myself!" said Miss Warwick. "Sit down, my dear, now we are in a room where we need not fear interruption--sit down, and don't tremble like an aspen leaf," said Lady Frances Somerset, who saw that at this moment, reproaches would have been equally unnecessary and cruel. Unused to be treated with judicious kindness, Angelina's heart was deeply touched by it, and she opened her whole mind to Lady Frances, with the frankness of a young person conscious of her own folly, not desirous to apologize or extenuate, but anxious to regain the esteem of a friend. "To be sure, my dear, it was, as you say, rather foolish to set out in quest of an _unknown friend_," said Lady Frances, after listening to the confessions of Angelina. "And why, after all, was it necessary to have an elopement?" "Oh, madam, I am sensible of my folly--I had long formed a project of living in a cottage in Wales--and Miss Burrage described Wales to me as a terrestrial paradise." "Miss Burrage! then why did she not go to paradise along with you?" said Lady Frances. "I don't know--she was was so much attached to Lady Di. Chillingworth, she said, she could never think of leaving her: she charged me never to mention the cottage scheme to Lady Di., who would only laugh at it. Indeed, Lady Di. was almost always out whilst we were in London, or dressing, or at cards, and I could seldom speak to her, especially about cottages; and I wished for a friend, to whom I could open my whole heart, and whom I could love and esteem, and who should have the same tastes and notions with myself." "I am sorry that last condition is part of your definition of a friend," said Lady Frances, smiling; "for I will not swear that my notions are the same as yours, but yet I think you would have found me as good a friend as this Araminta of yours. Was it necessary to perfect felicity to have an _unknown friend_?"