The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 313: what you’re looking at

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

282 REYNOLDS’ WORKS } brink of ruin, when a frightful exposure threatened him, when the gulf was about to open at his feet, you, Sir Fred- erick, came forward, not ostentatiously, but privately and secretly — ”’ | “Stop, Anastatia,’’ said the great merchant, “this is sufficient. Let us allude to the topic no more.’’ | If a very acute observer had been present, one intimately acquainted with the ways of the world, and skilled in reading the mysteries of the human heart, he would have been led to suspect, or indeed perhaps he would have plainly seen, that Sir Frederick Latham had suffered his wife to proceed to just that sufficient extent which ministered to his own vanity, and which reminded herself of the great pecuniary obligations under which her family laboured toward him, and that he had then stopped her just at the point where he might seem to have been listening hitherto for courtesy’s sake, but beyond which to listen any longer would be per- haps to excite a suspicion as to his real motives. He now gave the conversation a complete turn, and shortly afterward Lady Anastatia proceeded to her dressing-room to perform her evening toilet. CORNICIOOKS (E(0)