“Excuse this scrawl; I can scarcely hold my pen in consequence of a ruffianly attack made upon me by your father’s favourite factotum, Jabez Clegg, in Moor Lane last night. Can you disclose to me the strange fatality which kept you from my expectant arms, and revealed our plans to that upstart foundling? Had not Mr. Ashton also struck at me with a stick, I could readily have disposed of his assistant; but my foot tripped over a stone, and falling, I lay at their mercy. Yet, sweet Augusta, if my blood flowed it was for thy sake, and for thy sake I endure. “Be constant, be firm; let no tyranny coerce you, and I will make a way for our union, if I steal you from their very midst. I have a dislocated ankle, a bruised and swollen hand, a plaistered crown, and I write painfully. I shall feel every hour a year until I hold you in my arms again. But if my angelic Augusta be only true to her promise, she will soon, in spite of spies and informers, be the adored wife of her “Most devoted “LAURENCE.” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-NINTH. LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON. It is no uncommon thing for a woman to gild a block, wreathe it with flowers, and then fall down and worship the idol she has adorned. Augusta’s hero needed no outward embellishment, so she fitted the fair exterior with the perfections and virtues of the high-spirited, noble, generous Mortimers and Mowbrays, whose acquaintance she had made in print, and had set him on a very elevated pedestal, in spite of all warnings. With that misleading letter of his before her, no wonder if the “blood shed for her sweet sake” converted the hero into the martyr, and placed Jabez and her father in the category of cruel persecutors. It did more. It erected a barrier against reconciliation. In vain her placable father held out a flag of truce; she kept aloof resentfully, though in the solitude of her own chamber she gave way, and wept at her isolation from all who loved her. Mrs. Ashton, whose sense of propriety had been outraged, whose maternal pride had received a terrible shock, was less readily disposed to condone her daughter’s offence; and, being a better business woman than a psychologist, her tactics showed none of her ordinary shrewdness.