Not without grave faults, though, it would seem, for a little later we hear of a morning coat which is much too light to please Jane’s critical eye. She cannot possibly give her maiden affections to a man who would wear such a coat, and so, after a while, he disappears from her pages and her life, to go out into the world, and win much legal renown, and be Chief Justice of Ireland, and always to remember with great tenderness the gay young girl at Ashe. Then there appears on the scene that unnamed friend of Mrs. Lefroy’s, whose love is so sudden and fervent that Miss Austen feels quite sure it will soon decline into “sensible indifference,” as, no doubt, it does. Then the suitor who has “the recommendation of good character, and a good position in life, of everything in fact except the subtle power of touching my heart”—which seems to have been the real difficulty with them all. Sir Francis Doyle, indeed, tells a very pretty and pathetic tale of Jane Austen’s engagement to a naval officer who, after the peace of 1820, accompanied his _fiancée_ and her family to Switzerland. Here he started off on foot one fine morning, promising to meet his friends at Chamouni. He never came, and they waited and waited with fast-growing fears, only to learn, when all was over, that the young man had been seized with a sudden fever, and had died, unknown and scantily cared for, in some poor cottage home. It is a sad story, but happily does not rest upon any shadow of foundation. Miss Austen never was engaged, and never was in Switzerland; and although Sir Francis had the tale from a friend, who had it from a member of the family, it merely goes to prove that even relatives are not wholly incapable of weaving romances out of thin air, rather than be, like the knife-grinder, without a tale to tell. Mrs. Malden, Jane Austen’s enthusiastic biographer, discredits most unhesitatingly this particular love-legend, while at the same time she manifests a lively desire to give form and color to another, scarcely less intangible. The third chapter in her little volume is enticingly headed “Her Life’s One Romance,” and in it is narrated at some length the story of an attractive young clergyman whom Jane and Cassandra Austen met one summer at a seaside resort in Devonshire. He openly admired the younger girl, and, when they parted, “impressed strongly on the sisters his intention of meeting them again.” He died, however, shortly after, and Jane neither gave any outward token of grief, nor indulged in any confidences on the subject. Nevertheless, Cassandra, whose own youth was shadowed by the blight of a lost love, was wont to say, after her sister’s death, that she believed this to have been her one and only romance; and Miss Thackeray, in her sympathetic sketch of Miss Austen, alludes very sweetly and very confidently to the tale.