"Every thing you have said has been in allusion to my approaching union with Lady Adeline Seymour, an engagement you cannot be ignorant of, as it has been well known to the world in general for some years past. Tell me, I adjure you tell me, to what principles, to what habits do you allude? There is enough in your words to startle and confound me; but there lurks yet an unpronounced sentence in your mind, which I now implore you to declare. If, indeed, the least regard for my happiness ever swayed your breast, be explicit now, for my destiny perhaps hangs on your open sincerity." Lord Albert's thoughts were one chaos of uneasiness and pain; jealousy had fired the train, which set his whole being in a state of anarchy, and he lost all command over himself--all presence of mind, or capability of sifting truth from falsehood. Poor human reason, how weak is it even in the strongest minds! when the passions are roused, who dares to answer for himself, unless a higher power assist him in his hour of need? "Be composed, be calm," said Lady Hamlet Vernon, "do nothing in haste; suffer me now to drop this subject, and we may resume it at a more favourable opportunity, when you have considered fully the opinions I have now expressed. All I wish you to remember is, that when a man chooses a companion for life, the chief thing to be considered is, not her amiable qualities, but whether they are of a kind which will assimilate with his. The mere obedience which proceeds from duty, will never satisfy a noble nature: no, it is the devotion of a glowing heart which beats in unison--a mind capable of sharing in the plans and pursuits of an aspiring nature, unwarped by prejudice, unobscured by fanaticism; above all, a heart that is wholly and undividedly its own." Lord Albert, in listening to these words, unconsciously compared the happiness of being united to such a woman as the one he now heard and beheld, to that of the pure but infantine mind of Adeline Seymour. "Besides," he thought, "is she so pure? has no preference for another, usurped the allegiance which she owes wholly to me? Has George Foley not become more necessary to her than myself?" And while these imaginations, and such as these passed rapidly to and fro in his mind, his eyes were rivetted on Lady Hamlet Vernon, whose exceeding beauty heightened by the expression of an interest for himself which he never before had seen so visibly betrayed, made him say, in a tone and manner not devoid of a similar feeling, "Oh! Lady Hamlet Vernon, you who can paint happiness so well--you who know to distinguish, with such enchanting delicacy, those shades of felicity which my warm imagination has figured to be the charm of married life, do not with a pertinacity unlike yourself, withhold from me the secret on which my fate depends, and either be my guardian-angel or--"