The smile and the gaiety had so nearly died out ere he finished those few words, that he was fain to draw her closer to him, that she might not see his face.
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LET us do Mr. Foxwell justice. He had honestly believed that Everell would choose to renounce love and be set free. This indeed would have been the most humane event that any reasonable person could have expected Foxwell to bring about. He might, of course, have played the part of a beneficent deity, and at once aided the Jacobite’s escape, approved of his love, and sanctioned the future union of the lovers. But he was no Mr. Allworthy. Indeed it is more than doubtful whether Mr. Allworthy himself would have carried benevolence to that length. A flying rebel, with a price on his head, whose possessions in the kingdom, if he had any, were liable to confiscation, was not the suitor a young lady’s relation could be supposed to favour offhand. One even fears that the virtuous Allworthy would rather have interpreted the duties of loyalty in all strictness, and placed the captive in the hands of justice immediately. But Foxwell, with all his selfishness and callousness, was not the man to make patriotism a vice to that extent, unless there was something to gain or save by it. He might be a heartless rake, but he was too much a gentleman to practise that degree of Roman virtue without any personal motive of profit or fear.
So the best course had seemed to be to send the fugitive packing, and nip this love-affair in the bud. And that was what Foxwell had supposed would result from the alternative offers. In any reasonable issue of the matter, there must have been separation for the lovers and sorrow for Georgiana. Would that sorrow be ultimately greater for the postponement, and for the probable deepening of the attachment between the lovers? Perhaps; but Foxwell had not looked for this outcome. The cruelty of his little experiment upon the human passions, then, consisted in his exposing the young lover’s heart, and playing upon it, for the amusement of onlookers. The cruelty of the intention was not lessened by the fact that Everell himself, wholly concerned as to his fate and his love, did not at the time see himself as a man exhibited and played upon.