are thirty, will have outlived their looks completely, and Helen is just the sort of person to fret herself into a decline."
"My dear, how you do run on, conjuring up one chance of unhappiness after another! and I cannot believe there is any foundation for any of them."
"No, because you do not choose to believe, Mr. Douglas; but I thought that even you must have observed Lord Teviot's guilty look when Helen said she was going home. You must have remarked that; and then that wicked Lady Portmore proposing, actually proposing to follow him in her yacht. I was quite annoyed that Eliza should hear such improper conversation. However, my belief is that she and Lord Teviot will go no further than London, and the Lisbon journey will be given up, now that, under pretence of it, he has got rid of his wife."
"I cannot think all this can be so, Anne; it is too bad to be true."
"Nothing is too bad to be true, Mr Douglas, and nothing is true that is not bad. Those are two axioms I never can persuade you to remember; and I am certain that we do not give that fine set credit for half the vices they practise. We may good-naturedly try to gloss over this Teviot story" (Mr. Douglas looked up, and shook his head); "but just consider what you would have said if the same circumstances had occurred in a lower rank of life. Why, when James Wheeler went off to America, and Sally Wheeler came home to her mother, what a fuss you and the churchwardens and the vestry made! and James only forsook his own wife, he did not carry off another person's."
"Neither will Lord Teviot. I must say, Anne, you have no right to put together such histories; still less to spread such reports. It is most ungrateful," he added, in an accent of deep displeasure, "after the kindness the Teviots have shown us; and if there be any foundation for your suppositions, it would certainly be becoming, and I should
