fellow as you could see anywhere; frank, high-spirited, accomplished, with an exceedingly elegant deportment, and simple, winning manners--and could she but be touched with a lively sense of the noble disinterestedness of his attachment to her! I declare that Kate wrote him several letters, in _bonâ fide_ dissuasion of his addresses, and which wore such a genuine and determined air of repulsion, as would have staggered most men; but young Delamere cared not one straw for any of them: let Kate vary her tone as she pleased, he told her simply that he had sent them to his mother, who said they were very good letters indeed; so he would make a point of reading all she would send him, and so forth. When Kate, with too solemn an emphasis to be mistaken or encountered with raillery, assured him that nothing upon earth should prevail upon her to quit her present station in her brother's family, at all events until he had completely surmounted all his troubles, Delamere, with looks of fond admiration, would reply that it signified nothing, as he was prepared to wait her pleasure, and submit to any caprice or unkindness in which her heart would allow her to indulge. I must own that poor Kate was, on more than one occasion of his exhibiting traits of delicate generosity towards her brother, so moved and melted towards her lover, that she could--shall I say it?--have sunk into his arms in silent and passionate acquiescence; for her heart had, indeed, long been really his.--But whither am I wandering?--To return, then--I say, that when Mr. Aubrey adverted for a moment to this state of things, was it not calculated a thousand-fold to enhance the difficulty of his applying _to the father of Delamere_? So indeed it was; and, torn with conflicting emotions and considerations of this kind, nearly the whole of the fortnight granted to him for deliberation had elapsed, before he could make up his mind to apply to Lord De la Zouch. At length, however, with a sort of calm desperation, he determined to do so; and when he had deposited in the Post-Office his letter--one in every line of which the noble and generous person to whom it was addressed might easily detect the writhings of its writer's wounded spirit--the quiverings of a broken heart--he looked indeed a melancholy object. The instant that, by dropping his letter into the box, he had irrecoverably parted with all control over it, and to Lord De la Zouch it must go, Aubrey felt as if he would have given the world to recall it. Never had he heaved so many profound sighs, and felt so utterly miserable and destitute, as during his walk homeward that afternoon. Those dear beings did not know of the step he had intended to take; nor did he tell them that he had taken it. When he saw his sister he felt sick at heart; and during the whole of the evening was so oppressed and subdued, that the faint anxious raillery of lovely Mrs. Aubrey and Kate, and the unconscious