“Why, you know, when first I went to Elmsley Priory, you were the person I should naturally have liked, only you did not care for me, and Isabella did. Kind and affectionate as you are in other respects, you seem to have no room in your heart for love, as poor Lord John has experienced also. But Isabella! she then seemed made up of feeling!” Fanny dared not speak, breathe, move, for fear of betraying her agitation. Did she hear from his own lips that he had loved her? Did she hear him accuse her of coldness, while her brain was dizzy, and her heart throbbing with feelings, which, for two long years, she had attempted (she now felt how vainly attempted) to quell? And must she sit still and allow him to think her insensible and heartless? Yes! religion, principle, and duty, forbade her betraying, by word or look, emotions which might have invested her in his eyes with the only charm in which he fancied her deficient. Impossible to let him ever guess she could harbour an unlawful preference for the husband of another, that other her kind and unsuspecting cousin. The very idea made her recoil with horror from herself. A pause ensued. She longed to break it—could she trust her voice to speak? What would Lord Delaford think of her silence? But, if he should perceive that her voice trembled! She was relieved from her difficulty by his exclaiming,— “No! it could not have been my own infatuation! Isabella was then all I believed her to be!” Fanny perceived he was not thinking of her, and she had time to compose herself. The love to which he had so calmly alluded, had left not a trace behind, unless the confidence he felt in her now, might owe its origin to the esteem he had then imbibed for her character. Following the course of his own thoughts, he continued to compare what Isabella once was, to what she was now become. He regretted their tour on the Continent, and attributed her present dissipation to the habits acquired in Italy and at Paris. Fanny was able to utter common-place hopes that her cousin would soon be weary of this useless life, and assurances that her heart was still true and warm. When she was alone, Fanny found herself fearfully happy. A load seemed taken off her mind. Painful as it might be to know that, by her own pride, (false pride, perhaps,) she had lost the happiness of her life; the joy of finding that she had not let herself be won unsought,—that she had not wasted the whole affections of her young pure heart upon a person to whom they had always been a matter of perfect indifference; that her love had not been wholly unrequited,—relieved her from that humiliation which had constantly sunk her to the earth.