This consideration
enabled Miss Artful to make herself necessary to Zoe. Accordingly, she
showed, on the very first afternoon, that she was prepared to play the
convenient friend, and help Zoe to combine courtship with propriety.
This plan once conceived, she adhered to it with pertinacity and skill.
She rode and walked with them, and in public put herself rather forward,
and asserted the leader; but sooner or later, at a proper time and place,
she lagged behind, or cantered ahead, and manipulated the wooing with
tact and dexterity.
The consequence was that Zoe wrote of her own accord to Mrs. Dover,
asking leave to detain Fanny, because her brother had invited a college
friend, and it was rather awkward for her without Fanny, there being no
other lady in the house at present.
She showed this to Fanny, who said, earnestly,
"As long as ever you like, dear. Mamma will not miss me a bit. Make your
mind easy."
Vizard, knowing his sister, and entirely deceived in Severne, exercised
no vigilance; for, to do Zoe justice, none was necessary, if Severne had
been the man he seemed.
There was no mother in the house to tremble for her daughter, to be
jealous, to watch, to question, to demand a clear explanation--in short,
to guard her young as only the mothers of creation do.
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