neighbourhood!  A woman who can openly talk of expecting him to be twice jilted!  You shrink.  It is repulsive.  It would be incomprehensible:  except, of course, to Lady Busshe, who rushed to one of her violent conclusions, and became a prophetess.  Conceive a woman’s imagining it could happen twice to the same man!  I am not sure she did not send the identical present that arrived and returned once before:  you know, the Durham engagement.  She told me last night she had it back.  I watched her listening very suspiciously to Professor Crooklyn.  My dear, it is her passion to foretell disasters—­her passion!  And when they are confirmed, she triumphs, of course.  We shall have her domineering over us with sapient nods at every trifle occurring.  The county will be unendurable.  Unsay it, my Middleton!  And don’t answer like an oracle because I do all the talking.  Pour out to me.  You’ll soon come to a stop and find the want of reason in the want of words.  I assure you that’s true.  Let me have a good gaze at you.  No,” said Mrs. Mountstuart, after posturing herself to peruse Clara’s features, “brains you have; one can see it by the nose and the mouth.  I could vow you are the girl I thought you; you have your wits on tiptoe.  How of the heart?”

“None,” Clara sighed.

The sigh was partly voluntary, though unforced; as one may with ready sincerity act a character that is our own only through sympathy.

Mrs. Mountstuart felt the extra weight in the young lady’s falling breath.  There was no necessity for a deep sigh over an absence of heart or confession of it.  If Clara did not love the man to whom she was betrothed, sighing about it signified what? some pretence; and a pretence is the cloak of a secret.  Girls do not sigh in that way with compassion for the man they have no heart for, unless at the same time they should be oppressed by the knowledge or dread of having a heart for some one else.  As a rule, they have no compassion to bestow on him:  you might as reasonably expect a soldier to bewail the enemy he strikes in action:  they must be very disengaged to have it.  And supposing a show of the thing to be exhibited, when it has not been worried out of them, there is a reserve in the background:  they are pitying themselves under a mask of decent pity of their wretch.

So ran Mrs. Mountstuart’s calculations, which were like her suspicion, coarse and broad, not absolutely incorrect, but not of an exact measure with the truth.  That pin’s head of the truth is rarely hit by design.  The search after it of the professionally penetrative in the dark of a bosom may bring it forth by the heavy knocking all about the neighbourhood that we call good guessing, but it does not come out clean; other matter adheres to it; and being more it is less than truth.  The unadulterate is to be had only by faith in it or by waiting for it.

A lover! thought the sagacious dame.  There was no lover:  some love there was:  or, rather, there was a preparation of the chamber, with no lamp yet lighted.