Cornelia refused to obey her lover’s mandate, and wrote briefly.  She would not condescend to allude to the unutterable wretchedness afflicting her, but spoke of her duty to her father being foremost in her prayers for strength.  Sir Purcell interpreted this as indicating the beginning of their alienation.  He chided her gravely in an otherwise pleasant letter.  She was wrong to base her whole reply upon the little sentence of reproach, but self-justification was necessary to her spirit.  Indeed, an involuntary comparison of her two suitors was forced on her, and, dry as was Sir Twickenham’s mind, she could not but acknowledge that he had behaved with an extraordinary courtesy, amounting to chivalry, in his suit.  On two occasions he had declined to let her be pressed to decide.  He came to the house, and went, like an ordinary visitor.  She was indebted to him for that splendid luxury of indecision, which so few of the maids of earth enjoy for a lengthened term.  The rude shakings given her by Sir Purcell, at a time when she needed all her power of dreaming, to support the horror of accumulated facts, was almost resented.  “He as much as says he doubts me, when this is what I endure!” she cried to herself, as Mrs. Chump ordered her champagne-glass to be filled, with “Now, Cornelia, my dear; if it’s bad luck we’re in for, there’s nothin’ cheats ut like champagne,” and she had to put the (to her) nauseous bubbles to her lips.  Sir Purcell had not been told of her tribulations, and he had not expressed any doubt of her truth; but sentimentalists can read one another with peculiar accuracy through their bewitching gauzes.  She read his unwritten doubt, and therefore expected her unwritten misery to be read.

So it is when you play at Life!  When you will not go straight, you get into this twisting maze.  Now he wrote coldly, and she had to repress a feeling of resentment at that also.  She ascribed the changes of his tone fundamentally to want of faith in her, and absolutely, during the struggle she underwent, she by this means somehow strengthened her idea of her own faithfulness.  She would have phrased her projected line of conduct thus:  “I owe every appearance of assent to my poor father’s scheme, that will spare his health.  I owe him everything, save the positive sacrifice of my hand.”  In fact, she meant to do her duty to her father up to the last moment, and then, on the extreme verge, to remember her duty to her lover.  But she could not write it down, and tell her lover as much.  She knew instinctively that, facing the eyes, it would not look well.  Perhaps, at another season, she would have acted and thought with less folly; but the dull pain of her great uncertainty, and the little stinging whips daily applied to her, exaggerated her tendency to self-deception.  “Who has ever had to bear so much?—­what slave?” she would exclaim, as a refuge from the edge of his veiled irony.  For a slave has, if not selection of what he will eat and drink, the option of rejecting