I control not your affection, but it is my duty, and I will obey it, to warn you when I see your favourite companion likely to lead you wrong.

Had your every thought and feeling been open to my inspection as at Oakwood, would you have trifled as you have with the most sacred feelings of a fellow-creature?
would you have called forth love by every winning art, by marked preference to reject it, when acknowledged, with scorn, with triumph ill concealed?
would you have sported thus with a heart whose affections would do honour to the favoured one on whom they were bestowed?
would you have cast aside in this manner all that integrity and honour I hoped and believed were your own?
Caroline, you have disappointed and deceived your parents; you have blighted their fondest hopes, and destroyed, sinfully destroyed, the peace of a noble, virtuous, excellent young man, who loved you with all the deep fervour of an enthusiastic soul.

To have beheld him your husband would have fulfilled every wish, every hope entertained by your father and myself.
I would have intrusted your happiness to his care without one doubt arising within me; and you have spurned his offer, rejected him without reason, without regret, without sympathy for his wounded and disappointed feelings, without giving him one hope that in time his affection might be returned.

Caroline, why have you thus decidedly rejected him?
what is there in the young man you see to bid you tremble for your future happiness ?" Caroline answered not; she had leaned her arms on the cushion of the couch, and buried her face upon them, while her mother spoke, and Mrs.
Hamilton in vain waited for her reply.
"Caroline," she continued, in a tone of such appealing affection, it seemed strange that it touched not the heart of her child, "Caroline, I will not intrude on your confidence, but one question I must ask, and I implore you to answer me truly--do you love another ?" Still Caroline spoke not, moved not.

Her mother continued, "If you do, why should you hide it from me, your own mother, Caroline?
You believe my conduct changed towards you, but you have condemned me without proof.
You have abandoned my sympathy--shrunk from my love.