The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 200: what you’re looking at

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

CHAPTER XIV DEATH It were scarcely possible to convey an idea of the feelings experienced by the twins on contemplating their suddenly altered position. That Christian should be the bearer of a ducal title, that Christina should now have a patrician prefix to her name, were facts which they could scarcely comprehend. They who had believed themselves to belong to a family in the middle class of life had now been told that they bore one of the loftiest names in the British peerage. Moreover, they who not a very long while back had known the pinching need of penury, and had moistened poverty’s crust with their tears, were to be now surrounded by almost boundless wealth and to be in the possession of immense. means of doing good. As yet they were unacquainted with all the minute details which so intimately concerned the mystery of their birth, but Queen Indora had told them sufficient to make them aware that they were the children of that Duke of March- mont of whose murder they had read and heard, and at which they had shuddered, — the children of that Duchess Eliza for whose sorrows they had wept, though at the same time believing her to have been the guilty paramour of Bertram Vivian. But now they knew that their mother was innocent, that neither previous to her departure from Oaklands, nor subsequent to it, had she deviated from the path of rectitude, and that though she and Bertram had loved fondly and devotedly, yet that this love of theirs had not betrayed them into error. Christian and Christina could therefore look without shame upon the memory of their unhappy mother, but not the less painful were the tears which they shed when reflecting how much that poor mother 175 EORUNEOOOKS (E(©)