Chapter XIX.

The recovery of Denbigh was as rapid as the most sanguine expectation of his friends could hope for, and in ten days he left his bed, and would sit an hour or two at a time in his dressing-room, where Mrs. Wilson, accompanied by Jane or Emily, came and read to him; and it was a remark of Sir Edward’s gamekeeper, that the woodcocks had become so tame during the time Mr. Moseley was shut up in attendance on his friend, that Captain Jarvis was at last actually seen to bag one honestly.

As Jarvis felt something like a consciousness that but for his folly the accident would not have happened, and also something very like shame for the manner he had shrunk from the danger Denbigh had so nobly met, he pretended a recall to his regiment, then on duty near London, and left the deanery.  He went off as he came in—­in the colonel’s tilbury, and accompanied by his friend and his pointers, John, who saw them pass from the windows of Denbigh’s dressing-room, fervently prayed he might never come back again—­the chip-shooting poacher!

Colonel Egerton had taken leave of Jane the evening preceding, with many assurances of the anxiety with which he should look forward to the moment of their meeting at L——­, whither he intended repairing as soon as his corps had gone through its annual review.  Jane had followed the bent of her natural feelings too much, during the period of Denbigh’s uncertain fate, to think much of her lover, or anything else but her rescued sister and her preserver; but now the former was pronounced in safety, and the latter, by the very reaction of her grief, was, if possible, happier than ever, Jane dwelt in melancholy sadness on the perfections of the man who had taken with him the best affections (as she thought) of her heart.  With him all was perfect:  his morals were unexceptionable; his manners showed it; his tenderness of disposition manifest, for they had wept together over the distresses of more than one fictitious heroine; his temper, how amiable! he was never angry—­she had never Been it; his opinions, his tastes, how correct! they were her own; his form, his face, how agreeable!—­her eyes had seen it, and her heart acknowledged it; besides, his eyes confessed the power of her own charms; he was brave, for he was a soldier;—­in short, as Emily had predicted, he was a hero—­for he was Colonel Egerton.

Had Jane been possessed of less exuberance of fancy, she might have been a little at a loss to identify all these good properties with her hero:  or had she possessed a matured or well-regulated judgment to control that fancy, they might possibly have assumed a different appearance.  No explanation had taken place between-them, however.  Jane knew, both by her own feelings and by all the legends of love from its earliest days, that the moment of parting was generally a crisis in affairs of the heart, and, with a backwardness occasioned by her modesty, had rather