 your
sister; and must be supposed every way wretched and contemptible.'

A shower of tears fell from her eyes, and her heart seemed bursting with
the pain these cruel reflections gave her.

Delamere, by all the soothing tenderness of persuasion, by all the
rhetoric of ardent passion, tried to subdue her anger, and silence her
scruples; but the more her mind dwelt on the circumstances of her
situation, the more it recoiled from the necessity of entering under
such compulsion into an indissoluble engagement. The rash violence of
the measure which had put her in Delamere's power, while it convinced
her of his passion, yet told her, that a man who would hazard every
thing for his own gratification now, would hardly hereafter submit to
any restraint; and that the bonds in which he was so eager to engage,
would with equal violence be broken, when any new face should make a
new impression, or when time had diminished the influence of those
attractions that now enchanted him.

Formed of the softer elements, and with a mind calculated for select
friendship and domestic felicity, rather than for the tumult of
fashionable life and the parade of titled magnificence, Emmeline coveted
not his rank, nor valued his riches. No woman perhaps can help having
some regard for a man, who she knows ardently and sincerely loves her;
and Emmeline had felt all that sort of weakness for Delamere; who in the
bloom of life, with fortune, title, person and talents that might have
commanded the loveliest and most affluent daughter of prosperity, had
forsaken every thing for her, and even secluded himself from the
companions of his former pleasures, and the indulgences his fortune and
rank afforded him, to pass his youth in unsuccessful endeavours to
obtain her.

The partiality this consideration gave her towards him, and the
favourable comparison she was perpetually making between him and the men
she had seen since her residence near London, had created in her bosom a
sentiment warmer perhaps than friendship; yet it was not that violent
love, which carrying every thing before it, leaves the mind no longer at
liberty to see any fault in the beloved object, or any impropriety in
whatever can secure it's success, and which, scorning future
consequences, risks every thing for it's present indulgence.

Still artless and ingenuous as when she first left the remote castle
where she had been brought up, Emmeline had not been able to conceal
this affection from Delamere. Her eyes, her manner, the circumstance of
the picture, and a thousand nameless inadvertences, had told it him
repeatedly; but now, when he seemed
