A Fair Fraud — page 203: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

192 A Fair Fraud refused to marry, that she could not bring herself to confide the fact to her mother. She had an idea, too, that Mrs Lane would scold her still more for the way in which she had managed or mismanaged the business, and that she would consider her to have thrown away her chances of a good marriage by this sordid episode, and to have played her cards with the utmost indiscretion. Mrs Lane certainly would have been very much cleverer than her daughter had been. She would, to begin with, have temporised with the ex-convict, have promised all sorts of things to gain time, and would have led him to expect a much more magnificent haul than two hundred pounds as an inducement to him to wait patiently and obliterate himself; and in the second place, she would have worked entirely upon Kenneth Drury’s affections, and have managed to let him think that she was dying of love for him in spite of her refusal. But then Mrs Lane was very much cleverer than her daughter, and not half so scrupulous. Hester knew that if she told anything to her mother, every detail of what she had said and done would be dragged out of her, and she would be dreadfully reviled and reproached ; and so she determined to tell her nothing beyond the bare fact that she had told Captain Drury d that she did not mean to marry him. (Si C(O) i GORMGIOO