ABSTRACT
Matilda’s attention was soon called from her own sorrows, to those of her unhappy cousin; for such was her wayward fate, that duty, compassion, every sentiment, urged her to give up her time and thoughts to him, who had most cruelly blasted all her hopes of happiness. His situation now called more imperiously than ever for her active pity; for it was evident that Lady Julia, long the victim of illness and calamity, drooped from day to day, and as evident, that the ill-fated / Sir Harold drooped with her. He himself appeared sensible of his gradual decline, and contemplated it with a feeling of melancholy satisfaction. ‘Why should you wish,’ he would say to Mrs. Melbourne and Matilda, ‘to prolong my days? My life was attached to hers – every thought, every feeling of it interwoven with her existence. Ask the blasted and sapless branch, if it can bloom when dissevered from its parent tree? No – as we have lived, let us be laid to rest together.’
