Then came the news of Edmund Arundel's engagement, rousing Marian into such a glow of warm-hearted delight, as to waken Caroline to a complete sense of her power of affection, as well as of the contrast of the manner in which she regarded the prospects of her two friends. Caroline grew more unhappy, and strove both against her own growing wretchedness, and an almost magnetic attraction, which drew her to impart it all to Marian, in spite of the chill with which it would be first met, and of the advice which could never be taken; whilst a yearning, longing desire for the long-suspended intercourse with Walter, and a sense of his displeasure, formed no slight portion of her miserable feelings. The arrangements for her marriage she looked on as part of her destiny,--at any rate, they occupied her mind; and there would be an end, after that, of these dreadful and vain doubts. In the midst of all this, poor Lionel's threatened misfortune gave Caroline, as it were, a glimpse down a long dark road, where nothing had ever yet caused her to look; yet who could say whether it might not be her's to tread it? Affliction, sickness, sorrow, death, certain at last,--there was but one stay in them; and what if she should lose it,--if she was losing it already? I She thought of bearing them with _him_,--of the hollowness, the fallacy, the utter misery of trying to be sustained by aught that had not its foundations firmly fixed beyond the grave,--of not looking as sorrow as fatherly chastisement. (Caroline hardly yet entered into its still higher claim,) or at death as the gate of life. And O! if she loved him as her husband, what would it be to see him die, thinking, or even having thought, as he too surely did? All the train of fallacies about sincerity rather than forms of faith,--all the hopes that he might yet be brought to see the truth, and that she might be the means, were only soporifics for a moment, which failed to still the ever growing agony. She knew there was nothing in them, and that they were only extenuations; but still, amid all her unhappiness, there was a resolution to persevere, a want of moral courage which determined her to go on, and enter on such a life as this, rather than go through all that would ensue on an attempt to break off the match. Thus, though her reluctance was increasing, and she now sought to put off the decisive day, instead of precipitating it, as at first, all she attempted was to have the wedding deferred in consequence of her brother's condition; and though, logically taken, there was no great reason in the request, every one agreed it was a very amiable feeling, and so her desire was complied with. She would have avoided Marian more than ever, but this could hardly be, now that her cousin was in fuller sympathy, with all the family than she had ever been before; and little as was her immediate power with Lionel, Caroline would have given worlds even for that.