"I have the honor to be, sir,
"Your obliged and obedient servant,
"Martha Mainwaring."
Having perused the first sentence of this earnest and friendly
letter, Sir Thomas indignantly flung it into a drawer where he kept
all communications to which it did not please him at the moment to pay
particular attention.
Lucy's health in the meantime was fast breaking: but so delicate and
true was her sense of honor and duty that she would have looked upon any
clandestine communication with her lover as an infraction of the solemn
engagement into which she had entered for her father's sake,--and by
which, even at the expense of her own happiness, she considered herself
bound. Still, she felt that a communication on the subject was due to
him, and her principal hope now was that her father would allow her
to make it. If he, however, refused this sanction to an act of common
justice, then she resolved to write to him openly, and make the wretched
circumstances in which she was involved, and the eternal barrier that
had been placed between them, known to him at once.
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