“Men seldom take liberties they do not expect will, at least, be pardoned,” replied his lordship, with some severity of countenance.
Why Henry should be thus anxious to have it supposed that he was acceptable to Julia, while he took so little pains to become really so, is a mystery which time only can solve.
Our hero did not appear on the stand that day; although he was seen riding at a distance on the course. At the ordinary he went in to dinner without taking charge of any lady. At the ball, indeed, he was again to be found near Julia. After a few languid attempts at conversation, however, he seated himself beside her in perfect silence, till the Marquis of H⸺ coming towards them with a gay and delighted air, claimed her hand for the first set. She stood up to dance, and Edmund almost immediately left the room.
When Edmund retired that night to his own apartment he took himself severely to task: he could assuredly acquit himself of deliberate efforts, intentions, or even wishes to gain Julia’s affections beyond the limit of friendship; yet he had in every moment of temptation yielded to intoxicating hopes; and to attempt to distinguish between such hopes and wilful wishes he found was mere sophistry: he determined therefore to fly without again beholding Julia. As yet, her innocent heart believed all its feelings friendship. She would think him unkind, ungrateful, and forget him, without suffering any of those terrible contentions of spirit which he endured. He dare not sleep, lest he should awake under the dominion of a less virtuous impulse.
Without therefore retiring to bed, even for an hour, he commenced instantly and hastily his preparations for departure, confusedly ruminating the while:—What was he about to do? Could he leave Julia thus, to the persecutions of Henry, to the persuasions of the Marquis? and he drew his leg out of the boot into which it had been half way introduced.—But he was confident, he told himself once more, for the hundredth time, that she had already rejected Henry, and that she would reject the Marquis of H⸺. His foot again entered the boot top, and, now, completed its descent.
CHAPTER XX.
… “The troubled night pass’d away,
And morning returned. The shaggy mountains