to that regard, which had once been so prized by both. As yet however the indifference was but assumed.--Mordaunt felt, that it would be long before reason could extinguish his love for her, who was the world's idol as well as his--but every sentiment of wounded affection and indignant pride led him to conceal the passion he could not cure--The more he became conscious of the necessity of self-control, the more did he close up the real feelings of his heart in an impenetrable armour of cold and studied reserve. On the other hand, Selina's feelings had taken a far different coloring. His having, on their first meeting in town, apparently repulsed her advances to a renewal of their former intimacy, had given her the severest pang of mortification she had ever experienced; but vanity soon came to her assistance, and when she found that he alone appeared insensible to those charms which were so prized by others, she began, not unnaturally, to attribute his apparent unkindness to an insensibility she was undecided whether to resent or despise. Whenever, therefore, by accident they happened to be in the same society, she rather assumed than corrected the appearance of flirtation and coquetry, which was dissimilar to the artless _naÔvetÈ_ of her earlier days, and was least suited to the unbending frigidity of his present deportment. With these sentiments it is not then to be wondered at, that their mutual society should become a source of pain, rather than of pleasure, to both; and Lady Eltondale, watching with secret satisfaction the widening breach, made it still more irreparable, by ostentatiously appearing to court that intercourse, which both now evidently wished to shun.