I left London without waiting for the season to conclude, and buried myself and a fishing-rod in a lonely Welsh cottage. For months I saw nobody but the old woman whom I brought from Monmouth to cook my dinners. She, I believe, thought me decidedly mad--principally because I once swore dreadfully at her, when, _àpropos_ of a chicken on which I was to dine, she used a word vernacularly employed to signify the stripping birds of their feathers. I fished, caught nothing, and mused on Emily. At last, however, on casually extending a ramble to a greater length than usual, I found that a house, five miles from my present residence, and quite as solitary, had been taken by an English family. As a matter of course--though I really cannot precisely remember in what way--we became acquainted. All I know is, that I determined the acquaintance should commence as soon as possible, immediately after meeting a young lady in a pink bonnet, who was sauntering along the side of the stream in which I was pretending to fish. This was Caroline Lumley. They were the Lumleys--Captain and Mrs Lumley, and two daughters. The family had lived the anomalous life common to English semi-genteel families with small incomes. They had resided, now in Jersey, now in Dublin, now on the Continent--every where but in civilised and inhabitable parts of England. At present they had settled themselves down, for the sake of cheapness, in a spot where every thing except mutton and house-rent was twice as expensive as in London, and where they had to walk five miles to meet with a neighbour. That neighbour was myself. I was sick with disappointed love, and Caroline Lumley was dying with ennui. Need I say that in six weeks we were engaged! I really believe that she worshipped me as a superior being. There had been few or no men in the out-of-the-way places where they had lived. There never are. They are all draughted off to business and employments of various kinds. So I not only had no equal in her estimation, but could not, by any possibility, have had one. She thought me the handsomest man in the world. She used to praise my talents and accomplishments to my face. Indeed, by the side of old Captain Lumley, who, prosy by nature, had long ago exhausted all his topics, I might have appeared a Crichton. Every now and then, however, when Caroline had called me clever, there used to come over me a shudder. Could _she_ be ever brought to think of me as Emily Jobson probably did? The idea was positively maddening. Many a night did I lie awake, speculating whether, after all, it might not be better to secure myself against another such cross of destiny by freely revealing to her my great secret. At last, reflection, building on the reminiscences of an old Cambridge tradition, suggested to me a plan which I lost no time in executing. "My love," said I to Caroline one morning, "did you ever hear of Cambridge?"