one hour with objectionable particularity to another woman, was she to be consenting the next to a proposal which might have made every previous caution useless?—­Had we been met walking together between Donwell and Highbury, the truth must have been suspected.—­ I was mad enough, however, to resent.—­I doubted her affection.  I doubted it more the next day on Box Hill; when, provoked by such conduct on my side, such shameful, insolent neglect of her, and such apparent devotion to Miss W., as it would have been impossible for any woman of sense to endure, she spoke her resentment in a form of words perfectly intelligible to me.—­ In short, my dear madam, it was a quarrel blameless on her side, abominable on mine; and I returned the same evening to Richmond, though I might have staid with you till the next morning, merely because I would be as angry with her as possible.  Even then, I was not such a fool as not to mean to be reconciled in time; but I was the injured person, injured by her coldness, and I went away determined that she should make the first advances.—­I shall always congratulate myself that you were not of the Box Hill party.  Had you witnessed my behaviour there, I can hardly suppose you would ever have thought well of me again.  Its effect upon her appears in the immediate resolution it produced:  as soon as she found I was really gone from Randalls, she closed with the offer of that officious Mrs. Elton; the whole system of whose treatment of her, by the bye, has ever filled me with indignation and hatred.  I must not quarrel with a spirit of forbearance which has been so richly extended towards myself; but, otherwise, I should loudly protest against the share of it which that woman has known.—­ `Jane,’ indeed!—­You will observe that I have not yet indulged myself in calling her by that name, even to you.  Think, then, what I must have endured in hearing it bandied between the Eltons with all the vulgarity of needless repetition, and all the insolence of imaginary superiority.  Have patience with me, I shall soon have done.—­ She closed with this offer, resolving to break with me entirely, and wrote the next day to tell me that we never were to meet again.—­ She felt the engagement to be a source of repentance and misery to each:  she dissolved it.—­This letter reached me on the very morning of my poor aunt’s death.  I answered it within an hour; but from the confusion of my mind, and the multiplicity of business falling on me at once, my answer, instead of being sent with all the many other letters of that day, was locked up in my writing-desk; and I, trusting that I had written enough, though but a few lines, to satisfy her, remained without any uneasiness.—­I was rather disappointed that I did not hear from her again speedily; but I made excuses for her, and was too busy, and—­may I add?—­ too cheerful in my views to be captious.—­We