 that I shall leave it entirely to time and intimacy to prove it so in the fullest extent.
Unnecessary is the proof, cried Roatsley with warmth, for false and malicious I have ever believed those reports to be. Yet you, my dear Sir, I am persuaded will be neither astonished nor offended, when I acknowledge that a multiplicity of disagreeable rumours continually reaching my ears to the disadvantage of those, of whom from the surer evidence of my senses I had the most amiable opinion, could not fail to shock and torment me; and if you can suppose a state in which you could just so far credit an aspersion as to allow it to teize and perplex you, without permitting it to influence your judgment, paradoxical as that state may seem it is exactly the situation under which my mind has for some time past laboured.

Far from being surprized, returned Mr. Howard with his usual candour, I think I should only have been so had you continued immovable and determined in your first prepossessions, when such infinite trouble and attention have been bestowed to warp your judgment and mislead your sentiments.
But my mother, you say, was in the secret. Pray how came she to be informed, while I and the rest of the family remained wholly ignorant and unsuspicious that my fair cousins had ever dreamt of quitting the secluded spot where they received their education.
That any individual of Lord Belmont's family should continue uninformed of any step taken by the ladies since their father's death, was by no means either their intention or mine. To their relations no secrecy was requisite; and in regard to others, a temporary concealment was merely thought necessary, because

it offered an easy method for escaping the impertinence of curiosity and investigation; and they naturally deferred relinquishing the name by which they had always hitherto been known, till the sanction and countenance of Lord Belmont should enable them to support the cruel retrospections which they knew their father's memory must sustain on their introduction into the world. An utter and absolute rejection from his Lordship to their application for acknowledgment, soon pointed out the fortunate propriety and delicacy of this precaution, as they afterwards disdained all thoughts of assuming or proclaiming their title to a name, of which their family, however unjustly, deemed them unworthy.
You open a transaction so entirely new, wonderful, and inconceivable, cried Mr. Roatsley, who had been attending with an expression of amazement in his countenance to this speech of Mr. Howard's,

that I can no otherwise hope to reduce it to my comprehension than by entreating you to favour me with a minute
