Mandlebert turned softly round to read their impression on the
countenance of Camilla--she was gone!
Attracted by her wish to see more of Mrs. Arlbery, she had run out of
the shop after Lionel, before she either knew what was reading, or was
missed by those the reader had engaged. Edgar, though disappointed,
wondered he should have stayed himself to listen to what had long been
familiar to him, and was quietly gliding away when he saw her returning.
He then went back to his post, wondering, with still less satisfaction,
how she could absent herself from hearing what so well was worth her
studying.
The young man, when he came to the concluding line:
_To scenes where love and bliss immortal reign!_
rose, let fall the book, clasped his hands with a theatrical air, and
was casting his eyes upwards in a fervent and willing trance, when he
perceived Indiana standing immediately before him.
Surprised and ashamed, his sublimity suddenly forsook him; his arms
dropt, and his hands were slipt into his waistcoat pockets.
But, the very next moment, the sensation of shame and of self was
superseded by the fair object that had thus aroused him. Her beauty, her
youth, her attitude of examination, struck him at first with an
amazement that presently gave place to an admiration as violent as it
was sudden. He started back, bowed profoundly, without any pretence for
bowing at all, and then rivetting his eyes, in which his whole soul
seemed centred, on her lovely face, stood viewing her with a look of
homage, motionless, yet enraptured.
Indiana, still conceiving this to be some sort of acting, unabashed kept
her post, expecting every moment he would begin spouting something more.
But the enthusiasm of the young Oxonian had changed its object; the
charms of poetry yielded to the superior charms of beauty, and while he
gazed on the fair Indiana, his fervent mind fancied her some being of
celestial order, wonderfully accorded to his view: How, or for what
purpose, he as little knew as cared. The play of imagination, in the
romance of early youth, is rarely interrupted with scruples of
probability.