A Fair Fraud — page 271: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

260 A Fair Fraud be here, and uncle and aunt could not very well receive you, as you will understand ; but we are to be married directly after Easter, very quietly and with no fuss at all—in fact, I have zo friends save you, and no relations save my sisters, whom I| hardly know; how- ever, two of them are coming to stay at Crook- thorpe for the event, and Edgar’s mother and only sister will also be here. But very soon after that we shall be in London, for Edgar cannot take more than a fortnight’s holiday, and we must find and furnish a _ house, ‘so - | everything combines to bring me to town, and then, dearest Hetty, I mean to see a great deal of you, and to be constantly with you, and keep up your heart. The time will soon pass away, and June is not such a very long way off.’ But it was a long, very long way off to poor Hester. And before it came something else had happened—a something so terrible and ' so unexpected that it well-nigh crushed the life out of her heart altogether. “It was in the end of March; it was one of those cold and cutting spring days for which our English climate is noted. Someone—an old admirer of Mrs Bradford’s—had sent her a box for a theatre, and although she had a heavy cold at the time she had insisted on going in spite of Hester's entreaties. COMIC OOOKS.COm