Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 192: what you’re looking at

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

LADY EVERTON 175 “There was now another separation. Alexandrina and — the marquis, bitterly deploring the past, resolved that the future should remain untainted by criminality. He went abroad again, well-nigh broken-hearted at the necessity for bidding farewell to the object of his first and only love, and at the anguished state of mind in which he had left her. It was even agreed between them that there should not be the slightest epistolary correspondence, — nothing that should increase the yearning they were but too certain to experience toward each other. What to the Marquis of Eagledean was his lordly title? What his immense wealth? They could afford him no consolation. He had long con- sidered the first as but an empty bauble, and he only valued the latter as a means of enabling him to do good. Eighteen months elapsed, and during this period the marquis resided in Paris. His time was chiefly employed in visiting the abodes of want and poverty, and ministering to the relief of the sufferers. Wherever he found an aching heart, it became a solace to him to afford condolence; wherever he found horest penury sinking into despair with its vain struggle against the world, it soothed his own soul to be enabled to succour it. Nor less did he penetrate into the dens of vice and demoralization, to drag up from those sloughs such unfortunates as would accept the hand stretched forth to their assistance. It was thus, as I have said, that eighteen months passed away, and at the expiration of this period the Marquis of Eagledean read in an English news- paper that General Lord Everton, having finished his career in India, was resolved to return home. A few days after- ward another paragraph intimated that he might be ex- pected to arrive in London in about five or six months. “The Marquis of Eagledean now felt it to be a paramount duty to make ample provision for his two children, Eliza- beth and Frank. He had never seen either of them from the moment of their birth; he dared not see them; he felt that if he were to do so, he should long to have them with him, to take charge of them, to adopt them, and acknowledge them as his own. But how could he do this? He would have to bring them up, stigmatized with illegitimacy; and when they should ask him who their mother was, how could he respond to the question? Besides, if he suddenly appeared before the world with those two children acknowledged Gomichdoo <S (C(O)