Page:Lady Anne Granard 2.pdf/128

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126
LADY ANNE GRANARD.

by some unknown sorrow. You married a very young wife, and though it is certain I know no harm of Lady Anne Granard's daughters, a man who has suffered as I have done is liable to suspicion.'

"'I have known every one of my wife's sisters from their infancy, and more amiable, pure-minded women do not exist. The eldest is with us, for her health was so precarious that it was thought Italy might be useful, and——'

"'Has it been so? is she better?' he cried, with great solicitude.

"I answered 'she was; but that I imputed her recovery more to the tender interest she had taken in her sister and myself, than to any advantages of air. She is,' said I, 'one of those people who live on the heart; something which affected that, occasioned the derangement of her health, and she has derived her cure from the same source.'

"'Is she then engaged?—is she about to marry?'

"'Not to my knowledge; for she has refused very advantageous offers, and, I rather think, determined to reject all such. I alluded only to the excellence of her disposition, which, for our sakes, roused her to an energy beneficial to herself.' Soon after this we retired to his cabin, and he told me a sad and shameful story, which you will see in the English journals, with an addition they may not yet have announced, that, immediately on obtaining a divorce, he set out to travel until the affair should be blown