those two daily, and I heard of them from Heriot at night.  He refused to comprehend her determination under the head of anything save madness.  Varied by reproaches of me for my former inveterate blindness, he raved upon Janet’s madness incessantly, swearing that he would not be beaten.  I told him his efforts were useless, but thought them friendly, and so they were, only Janet’s resistance had fired his vanity, and he stalked up and down my room talking a mixture of egregious coxcombry and hearty good sense that might have shown one the cause he meant to win had become personal to him.  Temple, who was sometimes in consultation with him, and was always amused by his quasi-fanfaronade, assured me that Herriot was actually scheming.  The next we heard of him was, that he had been seen at a whitebait hotel down the river drunk with Edbury.  Janet also heard of that, and declined to see Heriot again.

Our last days marched frightfully fast.  Janet had learnt that any the most distant allusion to her marriage day was an anguish to the man who was not to marry her, so it was through my aunt Dorothy that I became aware of Julia Bulsted’s kindness in offering to take charge of my father for a term.  Lady Sampleman undertook to be hostess to him for one night, the eve of Janet’s nuptials.  He was quiet, unlikely to give annoyance to persons not strongly predisposed to hear sentences finished and exclamations fall into their right places.

Adieu to my darling!  There have been women well won; here was an adorable woman well lost.  After twenty years of slighting her, did I fancy she would turn to me and throw a man over in reward of my ultimate recovery of my senses?—­or fancy that one so tenacious as she had proved would snap a tie depending on her pledged word?  She liked Edbury; she saw the best of him, and liked him.  The improved young lord was her handiwork.  After the years of humiliation from me, she had found herself courted by a young nobleman who clung to her for help, showed improvement, and brought her many compliments from a wondering world.  She really felt that she was strength and true life to him.  She resisted Heriot:  she resisted a more powerful advocate, and this was the princess Ottilia.  My aunt Dorothy told me that the princess had written.  Janet either did or affected to weigh the princess’s reasonings; and she did not evade the task of furnishing a full reply.

Her resolution was unchanged.  Loss of colour, loss of light in her eyes, were the sole signs of what it cost her to maintain it.  Our task was to transfer the idea of Janet to that of Julia in my father’s whirling brain, which at first rebelled violently, and cast it out like a stick thrust between rapidly revolving wheels.

The night before I was to take him away, she gave me her hand with a ‘good-bye, dear Harry.’  My words were much the same.  She had a ghastly face, but could not have known it, for she smiled, and tried to keep the shallow smile in play, as friends do.  There was the end.