conceives--so Love, which makes us all poets for a while, throws its own divine light over a heart perhaps really cold; and becomes dazzled into the joy of a false belief by the very lustre with which it surrounds its object. The more, however, Camilla saw of Philip, the more (gradually overcoming her former mysterious and superstitious awe of him) she grew familiarised to his peculiar cast of character and thought, so the more she began to distrust her father's assertion, that he had insisted on her hand as a price--a bargain--an equivalent for the sacrifice of a dire revenge. And with this thought came another. Was she worthy of this man?--was she not deceiving him? Ought she not to say, at least, that she had known a previous attachment, however determined she might be to subdue it? Often the desire for this just and honourable confession trembled on her lips, and as often was it checked by some chance circumstance or some maiden fear. Despite their connection, there was not yet between them that delicious intimacy which ought to accompany the affiance of two hearts and souls. The gloom of the house; the restraint on the very language of love imposed by a death so recent and so deplored, accounted in much for this reserve. And for the rest, Robert Beaufort prudently left them very few and very brief opportunities to be alone. In the meantime, Philip (now persuaded that the Beauforts were ignorant of his brother's fate) had set Mr. Barlow's activity in search of Sidney; and his painful anxiety to discover one so dear and so mysteriously lost was the only cause of uneasiness apparent in the brightening Future. While these researches, hitherto fruitless, were being made, it so happened, as London began now to refill, and gossip began now to revive, that a report got abroad, no one knew how (probably from the servants) that Monsieur de Vaudemont, a distinguished French officer, was shortly to lead the daughter and sole heiress of Robert Beaufort, Esq., M.P., to the hymeneal altar; and that report very quickly found its way into the London papers: from the London papers it spread to the provincial--it reached the eyes of Sidney in his now gloomy and despairing solitude. The day that he read it he disappeared. CHAPTER XIX. "_Jul_. . . . Good lady, love him! You have a noble and an honest gentleman. I ever found him so. Love him no less than I have done, and serve him, And Heaven shall bless you--you shall bless my ashes." BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER: _The Double Marriage_.