What right had he to be more cautious than herself? why should he draw back when she advanced? In her desperation at the idea of parting, she had rather wished that their secret should be discovered; though she had not dared to tell it, she would have liked that it should be found out; and now he was, all of a sudden, so careful, so reserved, so cold. Ah! she would be cold too. She tried, but not very successfully; she could not assume the tone of indifference she wished; then she grew angry; vexed with herself and her feelings, which she fancied so much warmer than his; she became careless, flighty, and wild in manner; she laughed and talked one moment in an idle way, the next she was silent and dull; to him she was absolutely cross, and very nearly rude; yet he was calm and unmoved, as she thought, only turning with a graver, lower, more subdued tone toward his sisters, or his father, and decidedly avoiding her. What he was really suffering, the various emotions and changeful feelings which were torturing his heart, she did not know: she gave him no credit for an endurance which was little short of martyrdom; and was indignant at a self-control assumed almost entirely for her own sake. Not to compromise her any further was his object, and although he greatly feared that she was displeased, he had resolved that before the eyes of Isabel, no demonstration on his part should betray a secret she had but recently enjoined him to keep at all hazards. The very last time they had met, he had again ventured to urge an explanation with her father, fearful from a chance remark of Charles Huyton’s, that their secret might otherwise be betrayed to him; but this she had again forbidden; and his earnest prayers and expostulations had been silenced and set aside. He had been disappointed, and though forced to yield, he had warned her that evil would come of it. It was this which had made her so eager to go to the wedding, and it was this which so bitterly affronted her, when she found him coldly reserved. She thought him sullen, but he was only firm, and thus they parted; she with her girlish heart swelling with pride and mortified feeling, a sense of wrong on her own part, unavowed to herself, and therefore rankling deeply; a wounded conscience, to which she would not attempt to apply the only balm that could have cured her. He with pain and grief, doubled and trebled as he calculated all the circumstances; a pain greater than quitting his sisters, severer than saying a long farewell to his father; the pain of a noble mind, feeling it has done wrong, and condemned to suffer and repent in silence. He saw she was angry, and he writhed under the notion, but what could he do? she had forbidden him the step which could alone make reparation for his conduct; the alternative to renounce all claim on her he had fairly stated, and although she had denied the necessity of so doing, she could not alter his determination.