"Come, Admiral, we will walk to the Harbour and enquire into this matter," said Captain Acton, who was somewhat pale and looked extremely disconcerted.,
"Two or three days after your appointment of Mr Lawrence as master of the Minorca, I chanced to be going by way of Old Friar's Road to visit some houses belonging to me. At the bend of the road, which conceals the bridge and Old Harbour Town I met Mr Lawrence, and we exchanged a few sentences on the subject of the sum of three hundred pounds which he owes me. He informed me that when you, sir, had paid him off on his return he would hand me the sum of twenty-five guineas in part payment of his debt. We each pursued our way. When I had gone a few yards I stopped and turned to look after him. He had disappeared round the bend of the road, but just about the place where he and I had conversed I saw something white. It was a letter. Thinking I had dropped it in unconscious play of my hands during our talk, I returned and picked it up.",
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..
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