He established himself, therefore, as a guest in the family, which the presence of his sister, as well as of Lady Margaret Bellenden (who, in despite of her rheumatism, caused herself to be transported thither when she heard of her granddaughter's illness), rendered a step equally natural and delicate. And thus he anxiously awaited until, without injury to her health, Edith could sustain a final explanation ere his departure on his expedition. "She shall never," said the generous young man, "look on her engagement with me as the means of fettering her to a union, the idea of which seems almost to unhinge her understanding." CHAPTER XVIII. Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shades! Ah, fields beloved in vain! Where once my careless childhood strayed, A stranger yet to pain. Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. It is not by corporal wants and infirmities only that men of the most distinguished talents are levelled, during their lifetime, with the common mass of mankind. There are periods of mental agitation when the firmest of mortals must be ranked with the weakest of his brethren, and when, in paying the general tax of humanity, his distresses are even aggravated by feeling that he transgresses, in the indulgence of his grief, the rules of religion and philosophy by which he endeavours in general to regulate his passions and his actions. It was during such a paroxysm that the unfortunate Morton left Fairy Knowe. To know that his long-loved and still-beloved Edith, whose image had filled his mind for so many years, was on the point of marriage to his early rival, who had laid claim to her heart by so many services as hardly left her a title to refuse his addresses, bitter as the intelligence was, yet came not as an unexpected blow.