and have renounced for the future building upon its uncertain and precarious base. His sister, however, Mrs. Arden, was still in being, and might still befriend her nieces;—she who could with justice claim the merit of having brought them forward to the notice of those who were now no more, whose bodies mingled with the common soil, but whose souls were gone to an hereafter, there to answer for those ruling affections and motives which had influenced their conduct here.
Meanwhile, from the incompetency of the General's income, as we have already seen, to support the expenses of his villa, and dreading a repetition of those pecuniary embarrassments in which he had been formerly plunged, he brought himself to the decision of retiring from the world and all its vain pretensions. He fled to solitude—to humble life—to the far distant, lonely haunts of Wales—there to live unmolested and obscure with his beloved wife and engaging children, those tender ties which formed at once his solace and his pride.
