“You, Julia!” he said. “Yes,” she continued, dropping her eyelids, “I am very happy,” and here a sigh contradicted her assertion, “loving the friends I have loved all my life——” “All your long, long life!” ejaculated Edmund, with a smile and a sigh. “And I cannot imagine,” continued Julia, “beginning now to love a stranger; or suppose any thing so absurd as the possibility of setting up a new image in my heart, to be worshipped above all that have hitherto inhabited there! Oh no! that, indeed, can never be.” “So,” interrupted Frances, laughing, “we are to understand that there is an old _image_ set up there already! (a first love, I suppose, as Edmund calls it.) Is it then his lordship? or our amiable and interesting cousin? It would indeed be a charity to love him, for I am sure no one else does.” “Oh! you know Frances, I—don’t mean—I mean, one’s own friends,” said Julia. “Now ask yourself: could you ever love a stranger, as you love those you have loved all your life? As you love me for instance?” “A stranger,” said Frances, considering, “no, certainly, not while the stranger continued to be a stranger.” “Well Henry, you know, is no stranger, so one of my guesses may be right, or perhaps you like Edmund better—I am sure I do.” Edmund had remained perfectly silent; for a few seconds, he had actually been stunned by the extacy of an irresistible conviction that Julia was saying, as plainly as words could express it, that she loved him, and that she never would or could love any one else! But, on her appeal to Frances in reply to the interruption of the latter, his short lived transport faded. “She alludes to the gentle ties of relationship,” said he to himself, “and having known no feeling but that of calm and gradually formed affection, she cannot even imagine any other.” A momentary pang indeed shot across his heart, as Frances alluded to Henry; for Julia might have loved him all her life, if she loved him at all; but he was not, as Frances observed, a character very likely to inspire love. Then her manner, the expression of her eyes, the tones of her voice; how different, when she addressed himself, from what they were when addressing her cousin! This was, however, a subject not to be too closely examined, though it served for the present to banish all painful thoughts respecting Henry. “They talk, you know,” said Frances, “of love at first sight!” “Oh!” replied Julia, “such people must either have no real friends, and therefore no real affections, or be, themselves, incapable of feeling a real attachment!”