Vernon spoke more of her father, a scholar of high repute; happily, a scholar of an independent fortune.  His maturer recollection of Miss Middleton grew poetic, or he described her in an image to suit a poetic end:  “She gives you an idea of the Mountain Echo.  Doctor Middleton has one of the grandest heads in England.”

“What is her Christian name?” said Laetitia.

He thought her Christian name was Clara.

Laetitia went to bed and walked through the day conceiving the Mountain Echo the swift, wild spirit, Clara by name, sent fleeting on a far half circle by the voice it is roused to subserve; sweeter than beautiful, high above drawing-room beauties as the colours of the sky; and if, at the same time, elegant and of loveable smiling, could a man resist her?  To inspire the title of Mountain Echo in any mind, a young lady must be singularly spiritualized.  Her father doated on her, Vernon said.  Who would not?  It seemed an additional cruelty that the grace of a poetical attractiveness should be round her, for this was robbing Laetitia of some of her own little fortune, mystical though that might be.  But a man like Sir Willoughby had claims on poetry, possessing as he did every manly grace; and to think that Miss Middleton had won him by virtue of something native to her likewise, though mystically, touched Laetitia with a faint sense of relationship to the chosen girl.  “What is in me, he sees on her.”  It decked her pride to think so, as a wreath on the gravestone.  She encouraged her imagination to brood over Clara, and invested her designedly with romantic charms, in spite of pain; the ascetic zealot hugs his share of Heaven—­most bitter, most blessed—­in his hair-shirt and scourge, and Laetitia’s happiness was to glorify Clara.  Through that chosen rival, through her comprehension of the spirit of Sir Willoughby’s choice of one such as Clara, she was linked to him yet.

Her mood of ecstatic fidelity was a dangerous exaltation; one that in a desert will distort the brain, and in the world where the idol dwells will put him, should he come nigh, to its own furnace-test, and get a clear brain out of a burnt heart.  She was frequently at the Hall, helping to nurse Lady Patterne.  Sir Willoughby had hitherto treated her as a dear insignificant friend, to whom it was unnecessary that he should mention the object of his rides to Upton Park.

He had, however, in the contemplation of what he was gaining, fallen into anxiety about what he might be losing.  She belonged to his brilliant youth; her devotion was the bride of his youth; he was a man who lived backward almost as intensely as in the present; and, notwithstanding Laetitia’s praiseworthy zeal in attending on his mother, he suspected some unfaithfulness:  hardly without cause:  she had not looked paler of late; her eyes had not reproached him; the secret of the old days between them had been as little concealed as it was exposed.  She might