“Yes, truly:--but enough of this, fair girl,--go back to her who sent thee--wait, you are her friend--you nurse her--come, let me look into thine eyes--give me thy hand--on my knees I kiss it--her cheek is pale--I know it is--it must be--go touch it with thy hand, and offer there the chaste cold homage of my sorrow. You see that I am sad, lady--go--bless you--you are weeping:--how is this, girl?--be not so childish--a friend of Katharine’s should not be weak--I, you see, am calm and strong--my hand does not tremble--and these eyes are dry--methinks my heart is frozen--tell her so.” Jane Lambert stood fixed as a statue while he thus spoke; and as she watched him walking fast away, she felt, for the first time in her life, what it must be to have a lover, and to be the supreme object of such a man’s affection. Her cheek was stained with tears--her face flushed with agitation--her whole air disordered and absent. She followed with her eyes the tall figure of Francis, till a turn in the pathway hid him from her view, and then walked slowly back to Milverton. In the very first field she met George Juxon, and it was evident to her, from his manner, as he stopped and spoke to her, that he must have witnessed, at least, the close of her interview with Francis. There was a surprise in his look, and something of embarrassment, as he shook her by the hand, and asked if she was well; but he did not seem to expect any particular reply, nor indeed did he offer to return with her to the house, though she was but too conscious that her faintness and discomposure might have naturally invited such an attention. Observing, coldly, that he had some business at a builder’s yard in Warwick, but that he should return to sup and sleep at Milverton, he leisurely pursued his path to the city. Jane’s heart gave way to the multitude of troublous and perplexing thoughts which now beset her; and leaning near a friendly tree, she found a momentary relief in a passionate flood of warm tears. Her trial was strange. The feelings which had been excited were altogether new to her; and the effect of the interview with Katharine’s devoted cousin, combined with the cross and perplexing incident of her meeting with Juxon so immediately after, as to make it certain that he had seen her part from Francis Heywood, had very naturally overcome the ordinary courage and the cheerful composure of her character. She had witnessed, in the agitated Francis, the emotions of love. The sentiment, which thus shook him, she had never yet inspired--she had never felt for any one. Such love had been to her the poet’s fable; but it would never again be so deemed of by her;--and something that made her heart throb and ache within her told truly the want of that heart, and unsealed a fountain of affection ready to overflow upon any being in whom she might be fortunate enough to find the noble qualities of a manly heart, and the gentle ways and genuine fervours of an ardent lover.