Lady Susan became silent and absent; went to various repositories of grain and fed each of her pets; Edmund, of course, assisting. When she had finished, she seated herself on the three-legged stool, and began to spin with great assiduity and quite a practised hand. Edmund, whom she had requested to take a chair beside her, sat for some time in silent admiration of her performance. Suddenly, she lifted the toe of the foot that had kept the wheel in motion, and suspended the little white hand over the fore finger, of which the thread had been passing. “This spot, you see, Captain Montgomery,” she said, “is my plaything; yet, how happy might people be whose all it was!” “Certainly!” he replied with much energy, instantly making Julia in imagination its mistress, and himself her partner for life: “Here is all that unsophisticated nature calls for; and, in the society of an object beloved, how seldom would the outer world be remembered!” Her ladyship blushed and sighed; but Edmund’s thoughts were full of another image, and the blush and the sigh, which else might have spoken volumes, were unnoticed by him. A considerable pause ensued. “It certainly is madness,” said Lady Susan at length in a low voice, and with some hesitation, “It certainly—is—madness, to sacrifice realities to opinions, and those opinions not our own!” “Oh, most assuredly!” replied Edmund, “when such is the case; but when our own opinions, our own sense of all that is honourable, just, grateful, are in direct opposition to our own feelings of all that:”—he recollected himself, broke off suddenly, and coloured: not that he apprehended being misunderstood; he rather dreaded that he was too well understood, and conscious that he thought of Julia while he spoke, feared he had inadvertently betrayed sentiments it was so incumbent upon him to conceal. “Yet—yet—” said her ladyship, “if—if the object—of an attachment so tender, yet governed so entirely by honourable principles, is willing to wave imaginary, in favour of real superiority?”—and she held out her hand. Edmund first stared at the hand; then, scarcely conscious of the mechanical movement, took it in his. “For heaven’s sake, what do you mean, Lady Susan?” he exclaimed, changing colour twenty times in a minute; for, still possessed with the one idea, and too little of a coxcomb to be ready to believe her ladyship seriously attached to him because idle people had jested on the subject, the thought crossed his mind in the confusion of the moment, that Lady Susan must be in the confidence of her cousin, and must be expressing her belief that Julia returned his attachment.