She was full of revolt and anger, she was burning with her situation; if sensible of shame now at anything that she did, it turned to wrath and threw the burden on the author of her desperate distress.  The hour for blaming herself had gone by, to be renewed ultimately perhaps in a season of freedom.  She was bereft of her insight within at present, so blind to herself that, while conscious of an accurate reading of Willoughby’s friend, she thanked him in her heart for seeking simply to amuse her and slightly succeeding.  The afternoon’s ride with him and Crossjay was an agreeable beguilement to her in prospect.

Laetitia came to divide her from Colonel De Craye.  Dr. Middleton was not seen before his appearance at the breakfast-table, where a certain air of anxiety in his daughter’s presence produced the semblance of a raised map at intervals on his forehead.  Few sights on earth are more deserving of our sympathy than a good man who has a troubled conscience thrust on him.

The Rev. Doctor’s perturbation was observed.  The ladies Eleanor and Isabel, seeing his daughter to be the cause of it, blamed her, and would have assisted him to escape, but Miss Dale, whom he courted with that object, was of the opposite faction.  She made way for Clara to lead her father out.  He called to Vernon, who merely nodded while leaving the room by the window with Crossjay.

Half an eye on Dr. Middleton’s pathetic exit in captivity sufficed to tell Colonel De Craye that parties divided the house.  At first he thought how deplorable it would be to lose Miss Middleton for two days or three:  and it struck him that Vernon Whitford and Laetitia Dale were acting oddly in seconding her, their aim not being discernible.  For he was of the order of gentlemen of the obscurely-clear in mind who have a predetermined acuteness in their watch upon the human play, and mark men and women as pieces of a bad game of chess, each pursuing an interested course.  His experience of a section of the world had educated him—­as gallant, frank, and manly a comrade as one could wish for—­up to this point.  But he soon abandoned speculations, which may be compared to a shaking anemometer that will not let the troubled indicator take station.  Reposing on his perceptions and his instincts, he fixed his attention on the chief persons, only glancing at the others to establish a postulate, that where there are parties in a house the most bewitching person present is the origin of them.  It is ever Helen’s achievement.  Miss Middleton appeared to him bewitching beyond mortal; sunny in her laughter, shadowy in her smiling; a young lady shaped for perfect music with a lover.

She was that, and no less, to every man’s eye on earth.  High breeding did not freeze her lovely girlishness.—­But Willoughby did.  This reflection intervened to blot luxurious picturings of her, and made itself acceptable by leading him back to several instances of an evident want of harmony of the pair.