The suspicions and almost unconscious prejudice entertained towards him by Mrs.
Hamilton received confirmation by this letter, and she was pleased that her husband determined no longer to encourage his intimacy.

Percy wrote, if he had paid Caroline marked attentions, or endeavoured to win her heart, he was a villain, and he had done so, and Mrs.Hamilton could not but feel sufficiently rejoiced at Caroline's apparent manner towards him.

Deceived as she had been, yet that her once honourable child should so entirely forget the principles of her childhood, as to give him secret encouragement, while her conduct in society rather bespoke indifference and pride than pleasure, that Caroline could have been led to act thus was a thing so morally impossible to Mrs.Hamilton, that she had no hesitation whatever in complying with Percy's request, little imagining that in doing so she placed an inseparable bar to her regaining the confidence of her child, and widened more painfully the breach between them.
Caroline's heart, on receiving her father's command to withdraw herself by degrees entirely from Lord Alphingham, was wrung with many bitter and contending feelings.

At first she reproached herself for having thus completely concealed her feelings, and, had she followed the impulse of nature, she would at once have thrown herself on her mother's neck, and there confessed all, that she loved him; that she had long done so, and implore her not to check their intercourse without some more explicit reason: but Annie's evil influence had been too powerful.

She dreaded her reproaches on this want of confidence in herself, or what was still worse, her satirical smile at her ridiculous weakness, and then she remembered her mother's displeasure at her former conduct, and dreaded a renewal of the same coldness, perhaps even increased control.