ABSTRACT
While these things were passing at Brackwood, and while Woolaston in the course of three days had secured the mistress of that mansion, Ethelinde, from the violence of the shock she had received, could not be removed from the cottage of the shepherd. Thither Montgomery had on the first evening conveyed a better bed, and every thing which in his tender solicitude he thought might contribute to her ease and amendment. Trembling for a life a thousand times more precious to him than his own, he could not prevail on himself a moment to leave the cottage; but having borrowed one of Miss Newenden’s female servants to attend on Ethelinde in the miserable little apartment where she was obliged to remain, he persuaded the woman of the house, by dint of that most powerful of all arguments, money, to send her children to a neighbour’s, in order that the place might be quiet, and then dismissing her and her husband to their repose, he wrapped himself in his great coat and sat during the night by the cottage fire. An heavy stupor, the effect of her fall, seemed to hang on Ethelinde, and the symptoms so alarmingly prognosticated by Greame appeared in their full force to his terrified imagination; while Ethelinde herself, finding her head still extremely confused, and her whole frame greatly disordered as well as weakened by the loss of blood which Greame had found it necessary to take, really believed that she was in a few days to die; and far from feeling any regret, she fancied that it was the particular interposition of Providence to save her from keener misery than she had yet experienced. There was something not unpleasant in the languor she was sensible of; and she excused to herself the facility with which she allowed of the constant attendance of Montgomery, by persuading herself that in a few days the hand of death would divide them for ever.
