The next day, however, more fatal news was brought her, though not from
the quarter she expected it: Mr Monckton, in one of his raving fits,
had sent for Lady Margaret to his bed side, and used her almost
inhumanly: he had railed at her age and her infirmities with incredible
fury, called her the cause of all his sufferings, and accused her as
the immediate agent of Lucifer in his present wound and danger. Lady
Margaret, whom neither jealousy nor malignity had cured of loving him,
was dismayed and affrighted; and in hurrying out of the room upon his
attempting, in his frenzy, to strike her, she dropt down dead in an
apoplectic fit.

"Good Heaven!" thought Cecilia, "what an exemplary punishment has this
man! he loses his hated wife at the very moment when her death could no
longer answer his purposes! Poor Lady Margaret! her life has been as
bitter as her temper! married from a view of interest, ill used as a
bar to happiness, and destroyed from the fruitless ravings of despair!"

She wrote all this intelligence to Ostend, whence she received a letter
from Delvile, acquainting her he was detained from proceeding further
by the weakness and illness of his mother, whose sufferings from
seasickness had almost put an end to her existence.

Thus passed a miserable week; Monckton still merely alive, Delvile
detained at Ostend, and Cecilia tortured alike by what was recently
passed, actually present, and fearfully expected; when one morning she
was told a gentleman upon business desired immediately to speak with
her.

She hastily obeyed the summons; the constant image of her own mind,