Sink or Swim? , Volume III by Matilda Charlotte Houstoun

Alas, alas for the young creature that was taken, and for the old man / that was left behind! Kate's words were only too true; and Sophy, the / loved of many hearts -- the wealthy heiress, on whose bright blooming face / the winds of heaven had never been allowed to play too roughly -- was / numbered with the dead. She never spoke again, after they laid her upon / her bed by the side of her sleeping infant; and that she died / unconscious of the truth -- that the frantic denials poured forth in his / agony by Arthur of the guilt and treachery of which he had been accused, / fell upon ears that heard them not -- was, perhaps, the bitterest portion / of his punishment. That he had been accused unjustly, and that he had in / reality never what is called _wronged_ the tender wife who had paid for / her jealous curiosity with her life, was Arthur's only consolation in / his hour of trial and bereavement. He forgot that his freedom from / actual guilt was owing to no virtue on his own part; forgot that in his / heart he had committed the sin the bare accusation of which, overheard / by his poor Sophy, had consigned her to an early grave; forgot that / while _she_ was tender, loving, and true, his heart, ever since he had / led her to the altar, had been bound up in, and wholly occupied by, / another.

But if, in his yearning for self-comfort, and in the natural / longing of cowardly mortals to escape from the sharp stings of / conscience, Arthur Vavasour could find consolation in the reflection / that he had escaped _actual_ guilt, there was one who, from the hour / when he was first prostrated to the earth by the intelligence of poor / Sophy's death to the day when his own sorrows were buried in the grave, / could never bring himself to see any mitigation of Arthur Vavasour's / offence, or any plea for mercy on the ground that he had not been, in / _fact_, faithless to his marriage-vows. To describe the grief, the / frantic despair it might rather be called, of the father whose only / child was thus, in the bloom of her innocent and happy youth, torn from / his arms and from his love, would be impossible. The blow had, indeed, / fallen with terrible suddenness on the aged head that never, never again / rose erect, as it had done before, with the proud, glad look that / prosperity and domestic content are wont to lend to their possessors. / "Old Dub" (there was such a touching solemnity, a sacredness as it were, / thrown around his undying grief, that the name seemed no longer to suit / him, and died away speedily, as do the nicknames of children when age / and wisdom renders their foolish _petits noms_ inappropriate and / absurd), "old Dub" was never the same man again after he had seen the / delicate limbs of his dead daughter laid out for her burial. It was a / touching sight to witness, that of the gray hairs falling over the white / closed eyelids of the corpse, while the scant tears of age wrung from a / father's agony fell slowly one by one upon poor Sophy's marble forehead.