Edgar ran through this letter with an impatience wholly foreign to his general character. 'Why,' cried he, 'will he thus obtrude upon me these fastidious doubts and causeless difficulties? I begged but the restitution of my promise, and he gives it me in words that nearly annihilate my power of using it.' Disappointed and displeased, he hastily put it into his pocket-book, resolving to seek Camilla, and commit the consequences of an interview to the impulses it might awaken. He was half way down stairs, when the sentence finishing with, 'you cannot excite, you cannot bestow happiness,' confusedly recurred to him: 'If in that,' thought he, 'I fail, I am a stranger to it myself, and a stranger for ever;' and, returning to his room, he re-opened the letter to look for the passage. The sentence lost nothing by being read a second time; he paused upon it dejectedly, and presently re-read the whole epistle. 'He is not quite wrong!' cried he, pensively; 'there is nothing very unreasonable in what he urges: true, indeed, it is, that I can never be happy myself, if her happiness is not entwined around my own.' The first blight thus borne to that ardent glee with which the imagination rewards its own elevated speculations, he yet a third time read the letter. 'He is right!' he then cried; 'I will investigate her sentiments, and know what are my chances for her regard; what I owe to real approbation; and what merely to intimacy of situation. I will postpone all explanation till my visit here expires, and devote the probationary interval, to an examination which shall obviate all danger of either deceiving my own reason, or of beguiling her inconsiderate acceptance.' This settled, he rejoiced in a mastery over his eagerness, which he considered as complete, since it would defer for no less than a week the declaration of his passion. CHAPTER III _An Author's Notion of Travelling_ The next morning Camilla, sad and unwilling to appear, was the last who entered the breakfast-parlour. Edgar instantly discerned the continued unhappiness, which an assumed smile concealed from the unsuspicious Sir Hugh, and the week of delay before him seemed an outrage to all his wishes. While she was drinking her first cup of tea, a servant came in, and told her the carriage was ready. She coloured, but nobody spoke, and the servant retired. Edgar was going to ask the design for the morning, when Miss Margland said--'Miss Camilla, as the horses have got to go and return, you had better not keep them waiting.' Colouring still more deeply, she was going to disclaim having ordered them, though well aware for what purpose they were come, when Sir Hugh said--'I think, my dear, you had best take Eugenia with you, which may serve you as a companion to talk to, in case you want to say anything by the way, which I take for granted; young people not much liking to hold their tongues for a long while together, which is very natural, having so little to think of.'