Mr. Filmer smiled. "Perhaps," he said, "it might be more courteous to leave your question unanswered than to answer it; but nevertheless I will not affect reserve. I look upon it, in ordinary cases, to be rather a misfortune than otherwise for a young lady to inherit a large fortune. There are three results, each very common. Sometimes her relations and friends arrange and bring about a marriage for her with a man perhaps the least suited to her on the face of the earth; some coarse and wealthy brute; some dissolute peer. At other times, she becomes the prey of a designing sharper; a man probably without honour, honesty, or principle: low in birth and mind as in fortunes. Or if she escapes these perils, and reaches the age of discretion unmarried, from a knowledge of the risks she has escaped, she is filled with suspicions of every gentleman who approaches her; doubts the motives of all who profess to love her, and fancies that her wealth, and not her heart, is the object sought. I know not which of these results is most to be deprecated." He made a pause, and then continued, with a smile: "That you did not know the property to belong to her, shows that you can be influenced by no motives but such as must be gratifying to herself." Dudley cast down his eyes and mused for several moments. He was not at all aware that his conduct towards Eda had been such as to display the secret of their hearts to even the keenest eye; and he was surprised, and not well pleased, to find that it had been penetrated at once by the shrewd priest. As he did not answer, Mr. Filmer went on, with a frank and even friendly tone: "I need not tell you, Mr. Dudley, after what has fallen from me," he said, "that I wish you success, not with any of the rash enthusiasm of a young man in favour of a friend, but upon calm and due deliberation. You are a gentleman by birth and education; a man of high honour and feeling I sincerely believe you to be, and this Lord Hadley is in no degree fitted for her. Light and volatile as a withered leaf; with no fixed principles, and no strong religious feelings; full of unbridled passions, and appetites that have been pampered from his boyhood; the effect of wealth and high station, those two great touchstones of the human character, will be disastrous to him. He is in the high road now to become a confirmed libertine, and even at the present moment is labouring to destroy the peace of a happy family far more ancient and respectable than his own, and to introduce discord into a peaceful neighbourhood, where, happily, we have few such as himself to stir up the angry feelings of our nature."