Whatever the most unalterable and entire affection, acting on a noble mind and an active temper, could do, Isabel performed with cheerful tenderness and never-wearied patience. To assist in supporting her family, she took the farm into her own management, and endeavoured to rouse the attention of her much-altered husband, by pointing out the humble, but secure comforts, which husbandry afforded. She dwelt on every example of unhappy greatness; she reminded him, that to be deceived by specious characters, was the common error of superior understandings, who, lightly valuing the goods of fortune, never suspect that to others they will prove irresistible temptations. Her surprise, she said, was not that the artful should impose upon the honourable, or the mean ensnare the magnanimous; but that the former should have the audacity to attempt to cozen those who were every way above them, because, in so doing, they must depend upon the operation of qualities, which their narrow hearts and warped principles could not allow them to estimate. She once went so far as to say, that it was not superior discernment, which enabled her to suspect the perfidiousness of Walter. She did not view him with the partiality of youthful affections; she was ignorant of the many ties which bound him to a brave and grateful heart. Her anxiety for her Allan kept her attention fixed on one object, the progress which his agent made; and when she saw that the cause did not prosper in his hand, she searched for instances of mismanagement, and combined circumstances to his prejudice, which were not likely to strike an affectionate friend, who was too confident in the actor to scrutinize the action. How could she, who loved a brother with the same unquestioning fidelity as Allan did Walter, condemn the errors of overflowing affection? Evellin listened in gloomy silence. Too deeply wounded to endure even this mild censure of his own folly, in the shape of an apology for his weakness, he sternly enjoined her to avoid that theme.