I Forbid the Banns! — page 148: what you’re looking at

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

138 “7 FORBID THE BANNS!” Was he going to stand by while she became the victim of that coarse fellow—he was a coarse fellow, Charlton felt— whom she had called Eric Vicars? It only required that some plausible adventurer should meet her—some scoundrel who would pretend to have principles identical with her own on the question of marriage, and she would become his victim. She had an income of several thousands a year— quite enough to tempt that coarse colonidl, who had cer- tainly come to England to find her, doubtless after preying for some time upon her father. Charlton had a profound distrust of Eric Vicars. Who could avoid distrusting a man who had such an honest laugh? he asked himself. It is a peculiar instinct that induces men to distrust others who have a fine, straightfor- ward way of laughing—when they are not looking at their neighbors out of the corners of their eyes, and others who wear a perpetual smile—when they are not cursing their wives for having acook who sends underdone mutton to the table. Charlton could not think of Vicars with patience. Was it not clearly his duty to save that young virgin life from such a man—from all men who would only be too glad to appropriate her andher money? ‘That Mr. Hardy too, with his ridiculous theories and his semi-evangelistic airs—was he to be permitted to exercise his baleful influences over the girl, to get her to throw away her money, forwarding the interests of the society of carnisolists—as he called them in defiance of elementary philology ? Every moment made it plain to him that it was his duty to avert by all the means in his power the possibility of Bertha Lancaster’s being made the victim of unscrupulous adven- turers. Poor girl! She deserved a better fate than that. He had but a poor opinion of his fellow-men when it came to a question of their accepting the companionship of the most charming girl in the world with an income of a trifle CORMIELIOOKS (€()