There were many more letters--less playful and more passionate--the dates extending over six or seven weeks; and then there was a considerable interval, and then two letters written in the January of the following year. The writer had won his dearest Celia’s consent to a clandestine marriage. She was to leave her home secretly, and was to go with him to London, where all arrangements had been made. It was very evident that her consent to this step had not been won without great difficulty. The letters were full of protestations and promises. The writer was always repeating how his heart had been wrung by the sight of her tears, how the thought of her sorrow was almost more than he could bear. But he had borne it, nevertheless, and had persisted in his own designs, whatever they might be, for the last letter contained all necessary directions for the girl’s flight. She was to meet her lover at the coach-office after dark; and they were to travel the first stage of the journey by the night-mail, and then take post across country and get to London by a different road; so that any one following them, or making inquiries about them on the direct road from Bayham, would be completely baffled. This was all--and yet more than enough for the young man, who sat brooding over the last letter with a gloomy face. It was such a common story, and so easily put together: the poor, weak, provincial beauty, who is lured away from her quiet home under the pretence of a secret marriage, a marriage which is never solemnized, and was never intended to be solemnized; then the brief dream of happiness, the noontide holiday in a new garden of Eden, with the fatal serpent, which is called Remorse, always in hiding beneath the flowers; and the speedy close to that fever-dream of bliss--utter despair and bitterness. This was the hackneyed romance which Eustace Thorburn wove out of the packet of letters signed with the initial H.; and it was so cruel and humiliating a story that the young man suffered his weary head to sink upon the little heaps of paper, and wept aloud.