Jacob, significantly pointing her out, offered to shew the effect he could produce by what he could relate; but Edgar, giving him the charge of his horse, earnestly besought him to retire in quiet, and to keep his opinions and experiments to himself.
Each now, separately, and with nearly equal difficulty, strove to attain fortitude to seek an explanation. They approached each other; Camilla with her eyes fixed upon the ground, her air embarrassed, and her cheeks covered with blushes; Edgar with quick, but almost tottering steps, his eyes wildly avoiding hers, and his complexion pale even to indisposition.
When they were met within a few yards, they stopt; Camilla still without courage to look up, and Edgar striving to speak, but finding no passage for his voice. Camilla, then, ashamed of her situation, raised her eyes, and forced herself to say, 'Have you been into the house? Have you seen my cousin Lynmere?'
'No ... madam.'
Struck with a cold formality that never before, from Edgar, had reached her ears, and shocked by the sight of his estranged and altered countenance, with the cruel consciousness that appearances authorised the most depreciating suspicions, she advanced, and holding out her hand, 'Edgar,' she gently cried, 'are you ill? or only angry?'
'O Camilla!' he answered, 'can you deign to use to me such a word? can you distort my dearest affections, convulse my fairest hopes, eradicate every power of happiness ... yet speak with so much sweetness ... yet look at me with such mildness? such softness ... I had almost said ... such kindness?'
Deeply affected, she could hardly stand. He had taken her offered hand, but in a manner so changed from the same action the preceding day, that she scarce knew if he touched while he held it, scarce felt that he relinquished, as almost immediately she withdrew it.
But her condescension at this moment was rather a new torment than any solace to him. The hand which she proferred, and which the day before he had received as the token of permanent felicity, he had now seen in the possession of another, with every licence, every apparent mark of permitted rapture in which he had been indulged himself. He knew not to whom it of right belonged; and the doubt not merely banished happiness, but mingled resentment with misery.
'I see,' cried she, after a mortified pause; 'you have lost your good opinion of me ... I can only, therefore....' She stopt, but his melancholy silence was a confirmation of her suggestion that offended her into more exertion, and, with sensibility raised into dignity, she added, 'only hope your intended tour to the Continent may take place without delay!'
She would then have walked on to the house; but following her, 'Is all over?' he cried, 'and is it thus, Camilla, we part?'