Yet amidst this secret wretchedness and universal odium, the distant reflex of his name and authority was respected by all. Lady Bellingham found her reception very different, as the Protector's friend, in her return through England, than when she fled to Scotland an alarmed fugitive. Conscious of former remissness, Morgan met her at Lancaster, and earnestly entreated she would repose some days at Saint's-Rest after the fatigue of her journey. The alarm and mortification she had endured in that neighbourhood made her recollect the village with disgust; but there were some mysteries which she wished him to explain. Nursery tales affirm, that Puss, when converted into a fine lady, retained her old propensity of catching mice; and though Lady Bellingham was transformed from a fine lady into a devotee, the renovating spirit of true religion had not altered her temper or inclinations; there was the same waywardness in the former, the same cold selfishness in the latter. While she raved at formal and legal Christians, she was herself the true formalist, presuming on superior merit from the length of her devotional exercises, her rigid austerities, and the sums she expended in spreading her peculiar notions. But she came out of her closet to make her inmates and dependants wretched; her fasting-days were unsanctified through moroseness, and beside that, her gifts were too much confined to party-purposes to be entitled to the praise of charity; ostentation blew the trumpet before her alms, and she had the reward she sought, in the praise of men. To return from the description to the illustration of this not uncommon character. It happened one evening, as the Countess was anticipating the joys of Heaven, by an analogy drawn from the delights which Bellingham-Castle afforded, and which she supposed would there be increased in an infinite ratio, that her humble companion ventured to recall her imagination to this world, by producing what she thought a very pretty poem on the subject of love, which she found in their chamber at the miserable old delinquent's at Ribblesdale. Lady Bellingham shook her head at the name of love, commanded Mrs. Abigail to avoid the sinful subject, and to expiate the offence by reading fifty pages of "a popular fanatical treatise."