The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 39: what you’re looking at

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

20 REYNOLDS’ WORKS it could not possibly have struck any but the very closest observer of human nature that in the still waters of her soul a profound grief lay buried. Such observers are not often found in the gay circles of fashionable life, and the Duke of Marchmont himself, though shrewd and intelligent, was not much versed in the reading of the female heart. At length the duke took an opportunity to make an offer of his hand to Miss Lacey. She heard him with an aston- ishment perfectly bewildering, but which gave to her an air of modest, maidenly confusion. She could not utter a word: a veil had suddenly fallen from her eyes, — the haze through which she had looked upon things around her abruptly yielded to clearness. She comprehended for the first time that she had been the object of attentions bestowed for several months, and that in the very dreaminess and listlessness of her mind she might have seemed to regard them as welcome because she had accepted them. It was one afternoon when the duke called at Mrs. Bailey’s house, and when he found Eliza alone in the drawing-room, that he made her the offer of his hand. Taking her bewildered amazement and the subsequent emotions for bashful con- fusion, and this confusion for a tacit assent, he raised her hand to his lips, kissed it with respectful tenderness, and intimating that he would seek her father, quitted the room. Then, more vividly perhaps than for some time past it had done, rose up before Eliza’s mental vision the image of the lost Bertram, and clasping her hands convulsively, she sat in dismay, indeed, almost in horror, under the crushing influence of the thought that she had unwittingly proved faithless to that image. The ring with the initial B was in her bosom; it ever lay next to her heart. She drew it forth, kissing it in the resuscitated wildness of her grief, while the tears flowed in torrents from her eyes.. She had grown comparatively calm again, the ring was replaced in her bosom, the traces of her weeping were wiped away, and she was deliberately reflecting how to disabuse the Duke of Marchmont of the error into which he had fallen in supposing that his attentions were agreeable to her, when the door opened and her father entered the room. Though full of infirmities, the old man rushed toward her, caught her in his arms, strained her to his breast, and ere she could give utterance to a word poured forth a perfect deluge Gomichbooks (E(0)