“My own Julia!” he exclaimed, suddenly stopping short and taking both her hands, “you really look as much condemned as if I had brought this horrible accusation against your pure innocent self in due form; but,” he added, “you must consider that when we are very miserable, we are never very just to those who cause our suffering! Weak too as I thought your conduct, its effects were too much for my strength of mind: I felt that it was dangerous to be near you. In how different a light would all that imagination thus misconstrued have appeared, could I have suspected that it was generous pity for my supposed disappointment about Lady Susan which gave that dangerous softness to your manner, unchecked by any idea that my feelings towards yourself had ever been other than those of an adopted brother. And now, Julia, it is your turn to make confessions: do tell me what crowning of all my presumption was it, of which you suspected me when, no later than last evening, your gentle nature was, at length, provoked to say, ‘What can you mean? What can you dare to mean?’” She appeared very unwilling to reply; he entreated her to tell him, at least, to what feelings of hers it was she thought he meant to allude. At length she stammered out, “I suppose—I thought—I—must have thought—you meant—my—my—regard for—for yourself.” A delighted smile grew gradually over the features of Fitz-Ullin as he bent his head, trying to follow the downcast eyes, and catch the broken accents of the speaker. “But how then,” he whispered, “did you account for my not gladly, delightedly availing myself of—of—your—amiable condescension?” What words Julia found, or whether she found any, in her opinion, sufficiently delicate by which to express that she had understood him to have apologized more than once for not being able to return the secret affection he had discovered her to entertain for him, we cannot exactly say, for here the scene closes. No very serious misunderstanding, however, appears to have ensued, for the lovers returned to tea with perfectly happy faces, and, during that cheerful ceremony, Edmund’s delight assumed almost an extravagant cast, while Julia actually began to prefer his looking quite happy to that more humble expression of dependance on her sovereign will and pleasure for the slightest portion of his felicity, which used to gratify her so much.