Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 201: what you’re looking at

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

(184 REYNOLDS’ WORKS course an answer was received. Lord Everton (as I had better call him for distinction’s sake, although he has all along been a base usurper) wrote a long letter, in which he declared that he had consulted his sister-in-law with regard to the present state of her feeling toward the marquis, and that she had vowed to pass the remainder of her life in widowhood, as an atonement to the memory of him whom she had dishonoured. Lord Everton went on to say in his letter that he himself considered such atonement to be strictly due to the memory of his deceased brother, and he insisted that the Marquis of Eagledean should adhere faith- fully to the solemn pledge: namely, to remain absent from England. Lord Hagledean was cruelly afflicted by the contents of this letter, yet he felt persuaded that Alexandrina was acting under the coercion of her brother-in-law, even if she had been consulted at all in the matter. He therefore wrote to Alexandrina, explaining everything that Lord Everton had said, and requesting a frank and unreserved - avowal of her own sentiments. He appealed to her, in the name of that fervid love which for so many years they had experienced for each other, he enjoined her by all the cir- cumstances of the past not to send him a reply which would banish hope from his breast, and he suggested that if her brother-in-law still insisted on the fulfilment of the pledge of self-expatriation, she might join him on the Continent, where their hands could be united in matrimony. He said that he was well aware he was already violating one part of his pledge, which had been to the effect that all corre- spondence should cease between them; but he pleaded as an excuse the altered circumstances of their relative position arising from her husband’s death. He concluded by de- claring that upon her response depended all his future con- duct toward her, for that if she, by her own accord, reiterated what her brother-in-law had already said to her, he should, as a man of honour and delicacy, regard her decision as final, and as one too solemn and sacred to admit of any additional appeal on his part. ‘“Most anxiously did the Marquis of Eagledean await the reply to this letter. It came at the expiration of a few weeks; it proved a death-blow to his hopes; the decision was adverse to his fondest expectation. In this reply Lady Everton assured him that the death of her husband had GOmIEDOOKS.CcO