“Wilfrid would not have been so cold to me,” thought Emilia, turning the leaves of Ariosto as a book of ashes.  Not a word of love appeared to be in his mind.  This she did not regret; but she thirsted for the assuring look.  His eyes were quietly friendly.  So friendly was he, that he blamed her for inattention, and took her once to task about a melodious accent in which she vulgarized the vowels.  All the flattery of the Branciani dress could not keep Emilia from her feeling of smallness.  Was it possible that he loved her?  She watched him as eagerly as her shyness would permit.  Any shadow of a change was spied for.  Getting no softness from him, or superadded kindness, no shadow of a change in that direction, she stumbled in her reading purposely, to draw down rebuke; her construing was villanously bad.  He told her so, and she replied:  “I don’t like poetry.”  But seeing him exchange Ariosto for Roman History, she murmured, “I like Dante.”  Merthyr plunged her remorselessly into the second Punic war.

But there was worse to follow.  She was informed that after breakfast she would be called upon to repeat the principal facts she had been reading of.  Emilia groaned audibly.

“Take the book,” said Merthyr.

“It’s so heavy,” she complained.

“Heavy?”

“I mean, to carry about.”

“If you want to ‘carry it about,’ the boy shall follow you with it.”

She understood that she was being laughed at.  Languor, coupled with the consciousness of ridicule, overwhelmed her.

“I feel I can’t learn,” she said.

“Feel, that you must,” was replied to her.

“No; don’t take any more trouble with me!”

“Yes; I expect you to distinguish Scipio from Cicero, and not make the mistake of the other evening, when you were talking to Mrs. Cameron.”

Emilia left him, abashed, to dread shrewdly their meeting within five minutes at the breakfast-table; to dread eating under his eyes, with doubts of the character of her acts generally.  She was, indeed, his humble scholar, though she seemed so full of weariness and revolt.  He, however, when alone, looked fixedly at the door through which she had passed, and said, “She loves that man still.  Similar ages, similar tastes, I suppose!  She is dressed to be ready for him.  She can’t learn:  she can do nothing.  My work mayn’t be lost, but it’s lost for me.”

Merthyr did not know that Georgiana had betrayed him, but in no case would he have given Emilia the signs she expected:  in the first place, because he had self-command; and, secondly, because of those years he counted in advance of her.  So she had the full mystery of his loving her to think over, without a spot of the weakness to fasten on.