'
'Speak plainly, sir,' she faltered. 'You deceive me, or are deceived
yourself. I do not believe you--I cannot--I should not.'
'First,' said Mr Chester, soothingly, 'for there may be in your mind
some latent angry feeling to which I would not appeal, pray take this
letter. It reached my hands by chance, and by mistake, and should have
accounted to you (as I am told) for my son's not answering some other
note of yours. God forbid, Miss Haredale,' said the good gentleman, with
great emotion, 'that there should be in your gentle breast one causeless
ground of quarrel with him. You should know, and you will see, that he
was in no fault here.'
There appeared something so very candid, so scrupulously honourable,
so very truthful and just in this course something which rendered the
upright person who resorted to it, so worthy of belief--that Emma's
heart, for the first time, sunk within her. She turned away and burst
into tears.
'I would,' said Mr Chester, leaning over her, and speaking in mild and
quite venerable accents; 'I would, dear girl, it were my task to banish,
not increase, those tokens of your grief. My son, my erring son,--I will
not call him deliberately criminal in this, for men so young, who have
been inconstant twice or thrice before, act without reflection, almost
without a knowledge of the wrong they do,--will break his plighted faith
to you; has broken it even now.
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