All this, it may be remembered, Willoughby mentioned to his brother on his return from his morning visit already described. His not having seen Caroline herself, however, he suppressed; he felt he knew not why, an insuperable objection to mention the circumstance; not that he deduced from it at the time a doubt of his happiness, of which he felt he thought perfectly secure. He longed, it is true, for evening, and could not help thinking that his felicity would be still more complete when his fate had been pronounced by Caroline's own lips; yet surely the night before in the veranda she had accepted him quite as explicitly as young ladies generally do. His disappointment again that evening annoyed him very much; and during our heroine's protracted illness, the anxiety it was natural he should feel respecting her state of health, was mingled at times with gloomy apprehensions, which had yet another and a more agitating source. At length he left Cheltenham as we have seen for Montague House. His last interview with our heroine herself was that already described as having taken place in the veranda on the night of Lady Arden's ball. The secret of Caroline having never since been visible, was, that she still continued to resist Lady Palliser's tyrannical commands, while her ladyship, astonished at conduct so unparalleled, on the part of her hitherto submissive child, and unaccustomed to be baffled, was more than ever determined that she should finally yield. Accordingly she had put off the lover from day to day with promises and excuses which yet she scarcely expected him to believe, and with which in fact she cared very little after all, whether he was or was not satisfied, being with her usual whimsical inconsistency fully prepared, whenever he refused to play _blind-man's-bluff_, as she called it, any longer, to laugh excessively and turn the whole affair into an excellent jest. In the mean time she derived quite as much gratification from the amusement of quizzing Willoughby, as from the prospect of tyrannizing over her daughter. For it was a part of Lady Palliser's character, which was as absurd as it was worthless, to think it exceedingly witty to succeed in deceiving any body, though by the gravest, and therefore of course the dullest lie imaginable: we mean in the April-fool style, not vulgar business lying--that would have been out of her line.