During her short walk she continued to struggle with herself. 'Let me but this once command myself,' said she. 'And wherefore should I not? It is he who ought to shrink.--It is he who ought to tremble!' Yet it was Laura who trembled, when, advancing towards her, Lady Pelham introduced her to Colonel Hargrave as her niece. Laura's inclination of the head, cold as indifference could make it, did not seem to acknowledge former intimacy; and when Hargrave, with a manner respectful even to timidity, claimed her acquaintance, she gave a short answer of frozen civility, and turned away. Shrinking from even the slightest converse with him, she hastily passed on; then, determined to afford him no opportunity of speaking to her, she glided in between Mrs De Courcy, who stood anxiously watching her, and Harriet, who was studying the contour of Hargrave's face; and offering an arm to each, she gently drew them forward. Mr Bolingbroke immediately joined them, and entered into conversation with Harriet; while Mrs De Courcy continued to read the legible countenance of Laura, who silently walked on, revolving in her mind the difference between this and her last unexpected meeting with Hargrave. The freedom of his address to the unfriended girl who was endeavouring to exchange the labour of her hands for a pittance to support existence, (a freedom which had once found sympathetic excuse in the breast of Laura), she now, not without indignation, contrasted with the respect offered to Lady Pelham's niece, surrounded by the rich and the respectable. Yet while she remembered what had then been her half-affected coldness, her ill-restrained sensibility; and compared them with the total alienation of heart which she now experienced, she could not stifle a sigh which rose at the recollection, that in her the raptures of love and joy were chilled never more to warm. 'Would that my preference had been more justly directed,' thought she, her eye unconsciously wandering to De Courcy; 'but that is all over now!'