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It would exceed the bounds of possibility to suppose that any charming girl of great sensibility whose heart was disengaged, whose feelings were fresh and sweet, could nurse for the space of five weeks so fine, manly, and[Pg 448] handsome a gentleman as Mr Lawrence without falling in love with him. This may be true of ninety young ladies in every hundred. But what was Lucy Acton's case? She was secretly but deeply in love with Mr Lawrence when his own overmastering passion for her impelled him into the perpetration of an outrage upon her person, and a criminal offence against her father. She had loved him with a passion deep and concealed in her spirit long before her abduction, and Aunt Caroline had guessed the truth. She had loved him with an increasing fervency, even after she had been cruelly abstracted from her home, when she knew that her kidnapper's intention was to rob her father of his ship, and the freighters of their goods, and the crew of their wages. And never had she loved him so well as when she was feigning madness with the aim of being transhipped and sent home by him, and when at every interview his eyes reposed upon her with adoration in their expression and his bearing towards her was as gentle, appealing, respectful, and dignified as though he was courting her in hours of health and content, with her father's sanction, and under her father's roof., Mr Short said grace, and prayed for the King and Royal Family, and for the utter ruin and confusion of the French, Spanish, and all our enemies. In two or three places the walls were adorned by maps, with which no navigator of this age would dare to risk his life fifty miles out of sight of land. A spinet stood in a corner; it was sometimes customary when the ordinary was ended and the sentiments had been brought to a conclusion for any one who could perform, to sit down to this spinet and accompany any gentleman who was good enough to oblige. But it was always understood that the song must carry a chorus which everybody present knew so that everybody present might join in it, hence the same old melodies were very often heard in that long room with the low ceiling, and its clock whose voice was audible all over the house at night., "She has not returned, then?" said Captain Acton..