"I don't know what his intentions are," said Mr Lawrence with some blood colouring his face. "I saw the old rascal plain enough, but avoided his eye as I feared he might have the insolence to step aboard and address me in the presence of Captain Acton and the ladies, and yourself, sir. But if he has heard of my appointment I cannot conceive that he meditates my arrest as an alternative to my paying him in full, which he knows I cannot do. I should tell him that by waiting he will receive payment by instalments. This I can manage now that I have money coming to me. Will he stop his sole chance of receiving back his loan by clapping me into gaol?",
Captain Acton was silent for a few moments. He then said: "My dear friend, have you reflected upon all that your son's return to England must signify to him?",
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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