“Negative, passive, at the best, Mr. Whitford.  But I should have . . .”

“Oh!—­pardon me.  But you inflict the sensations of a boy, with a dose of honesty in him, called up to receive a prize he has won by the dexterous use of a crib.”

“And how do you suppose she feels who has a crown of Queen o’ the May forced on her head when she is verging on November?”

He rejected her analogy, and she his.  They could neither of them bring to light the circumstances which made one another’s admiration so unbearable.  The more he exalted her for constancy, the more did her mind become bent upon critically examining the object of that imagined virtue; and the more she praised him for possessing the spirit of perfect friendliness, the fiercer grew the passion in him which disdained the imputation, hissing like a heated iron-bar that flings the waterdrops to steam.  He would none of it; would rather have stood exposed in his profound foolishness.

Amiable though they were, and mutually affectionate, they came to a stop in their walk, longing to separate, and not seeing how it was to be done, they had so knit themselves together with the pelting of their interlaudation.

“I think it is time for me to run home to my father for an hour,” said Laetitia.

“I ought to be working,” said Vernon.

Good progress was made to the disgarlanding of themselves thus far; yet, an acutely civilized pair, the abruptness of the transition from floweriness to commonplace affected them both, Laetitia chiefly, as she had broken the pause, and she remarked:—­“I am really Constancy in my opinions.”

“Another title is customary where stiff opinions are concerned.  Perhaps by and by you will learn your mistake, and then you will acknowledge the name for it.”

“How?” said she.  “What shall I learn?”

“If you learn that I am a grisly Egoist?”

“You?  And it would not be egoism,” added Laetitia, revealing to him at the same instant as to herself that she swung suspended on a scarce credible guess.

“—­Will nothing pierce your ears, Mr. Whitford?”

He heard the intruding voice, but he was bent on rubbing out the cloudy letters Laetitia had begun to spell, and he stammered, in a tone of matter-of-fact:  “Just that and no better”; then turned to Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson.

“—­Or are you resolved you will never see Professor Crooklyn when you look on him?” said the great lady.

Vernon bowed to the Professor and apologized to him shufflingly and rapidly, incoherently, and with a red face; which induced Mrs. Mountstuart to scan Laetitia’s.

After lecturing Vernon for his abandonment of her yesterday evening, and flouting his protestations, she returned to the business of the day.  “We walked from the lodge-gates to see the park and prepare ourselves for Dr. Middleton.  We parted last night in the middle of a controversy and are rageing to resume it.  Where is our redoubtable antagonist?”