Charlotte Smith

“ Ormsby was directed, when, on application to Mrs. Lessington, he found she was herself settled in the north. After an explanation between these gentlemen, they determined to seek Rosalie together; and set out for Eastbourne, without suspecting that she was suffering under any other unhappiness than that which arose from a temporary separation from her husband; they arrived at Eastbourne, and found her emaciated by illness, injured in intellects by grief, and incapable of feeling that portion of happiness and prosperity, which, they hoped, it would have been in their power to offer her. ”

“ The agitation of the stranger became more violent. It was Ormsby, the unfortunate father of Rosalie, who, having returned with an ample fortune from India, had been informed, on his first inquiries, that Mrs. Vyvian was dead. From Mrs. Lessington he had learned, that young Vyvian, her son, was, by a paper she wrote to him before her death, acquainted with the real relationship in which Rosalie stood to him, and with the circumstances that had rendered her marriage with his father a source of continual unhappiness. ”

“ Claudine, who, amidst all her solicitude for her mistress, never lost sight of little personal vanity, stayed to adjust her cap at the glass, to put a little powder in her hair, and a nicer fichu on her shoulders; and then expecting certainly to see Mr. Walsingham, whom she concluded, in some measure, as her master, she fluttered down into the room, where, in his place, she beheld three gentlemen who were entirely strangers to her. ”

“ He found, on entering her apartment, that all the symptoms that seemed to have a little subsided, while she had been flattered with hopes of hearing news of her child, had since returned with renewed violence; a deadly paleness overspread her countenance, and a fever seemed to devour her. ”

“ Vyvian, breathing nothing but vengeance against a man capable of writing such a letter, would listen to nothing that Lessington could say; and Ormsby, lost in bewildering conjectures, but more uneasy than ever, determined at length to pursue his original plan of finding Montalbert; and, having learned the cause of his conduct, and of the present extraordinary letter, to take Rosalie and conceal her in some obscure retreat if she was guilty ”