“She had now, for many days, to undergo the torture of complacent and fraternal affection from the man she loved,--and perhaps a keener torture was never endured. To feel hands that we long to press to our burning hearts, touch ours with cool and pulseless tranquillity--to see eyes in whose light we live, throw on us a cold but smiling beam, that gives light, but not fertility, to the parched and thirsting soil of the heart--to hear the ordinary language of affectionate civility addressed to us in tones of the most delicious suavity--to seek in these expressions an ulterior meaning, and to find it not---- This--this is an agony which only those who have felt can conceive! “Elinor, with an effort that cost her heart many a pang, mingled in the habits of the house, which had been greatly changed since the death of Mrs Ann. The numerous suitors of the wealthy and noble heiress, now crowded to the Castle; and, according to the custom of the times, they were sumptuously entertained, and invited to prolong their stay by numerous banquets. “On these occasions, John Sandal was the first to pay distinguished attention to Elinor. They danced together; and though her Puritanic education had taught her an abhorrence of those “devil’s measures,” as her family was accustomed to term them, she tried to adapt herself to the gay steps of the Canaries(9), and the stately movements of the Measures--(for the newer dances had not, even in report, reached Mortimer Castle)--and her slender and graceful form needed no other inspiration than the support of John Sandal’s arms, (who was himself an exquisite dancer), to assume all the graces of that delightful exercise. Even the practised courtiers applauded her. But, when it was over, Elinor felt, that had John Sandal been dancing with a being the most indifferent to him on earth, his manner would have been exactly the same. No one could point with more smiling grace to her slight deviations from the figure,--no one could attend her to her seat with more tender and anxious politeness, and wave the vast fan of those days over her with more graceful and assiduous courtesy. But Elinor felt that these attentions, however flattering, were offered not by a lover. * * * * * * * * * (9) In Cowley’s “Cutter of Coleman Street,” Mrs Tabitha, a rigid Puritan, tells her husband she had danced the Canaries in her youth. And in Rushworth’s Collections, if I remember right, Prynne vindicates himself from the charge of a general denunciation against dancing, and even speaks of the “Measures,” a stately, solemn dance, with some approbation.