ABSTRACT
The usual accompaniments of a narrow mind and a selfish heart, cunning and suspicion, were strongly marked in the character of Lady Dacres. Althea, though formerly a sufferer from both, was little upon her guard against either. Artless herself, it never entered her head to imagine that her mother-in-law hardly ‘Drank her tea without a stratagem,’57 or that she owed even the little forbearance from rudeness she had experienced since her father’s death, and the apartment and board that were sullenly afforded her, to a hope entertained by Lady Dacres, that her little fortune, which she notwithstanding affected to treat with so much contempt, might, by Althea’s dying unmarried, belong at some future period to her own children. Somebody had besides hinted lately to this genuine descendant of Sir Ralph Gunstone, that Althea, and two female cousins whom she hardly knew, would be coheiresses to the fortune of Mr. Trevyllian, should he, as was not improbable from his manner of life, die without legitimate children. In that case Althea might possess the third of the very considerable landed property, which being entailed on the heirs of his father, he could not alienate; and though she herself scarcely recollected that such a man as this relation of hers existed, Lady Dacres, who had received the hint from Mohun, failed not occasionally to make enquiries after him: and the reports she had lately collected, greatly helped to reconcile her to the present abode of Althea at her house, and even to the idea of her adding another member to the family during their intended abode at Margate – though even this plan had not efficacy enough to take from the manner of Lady Dacres, towards her daughter-in-law, that ungracious and repulsive coldness which always made Althea comfortless and uneasy in her presence; a manner, which now that it was contrasted by the ingenuous simplicity and unaffected warmth of Lucy Marchmont, seemed to become more and more insupportable. In quitting the apartment of her step-mother after the next interview on the evening of the day of visiting Fullham, she had almost determined to leave her house at whatever risk of 246incurring blame for imprudence, or even of throwing herself, unsolicited, into a family, to the principal of which she was still a stranger.
