Laetitia did continue.  She saw Miss Durham at Patterne on several occasions.  She admired the pair.  She had a wish to witness the bridal ceremony.  She was looking forward to the day with that mixture of eagerness and withholding which we have as we draw nigh the disenchanting termination of an enchanting romance, when Sir Willoughby met her on a Sunday morning, as she crossed his park solitarily to church.  They were within ten days of the appointed ceremony.  He should have been away at Miss Durham’s end of the county.  He had, Laetitia knew, ridden over to her the day before; but there he was; and very unwontedly, quite surprisingly, he presented his arm to conduct Laetitia to the church-door, and talked and laughed in a way that reminded her of a hunting gentleman she had seen once rising to his feet, staggering from an ugly fall across hedge and fence into one of the lanes of her short winter walks.  “All’s well, all sound, never better, only a scratch!” the gentleman had said, as he reeled and pressed a bleeding head.  Sir Willoughby chattered of his felicity in meeting her.  “I am really wonderfully lucky,” he said, and he said that and other things over and over, incessantly talking, and telling an anecdote of county occurrences, and laughing at it with a mouth that would not widen.  He went on talking in the church porch, and murmuring softly some steps up the aisle, passing the pews of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson and Lady Busshe.  Of course he was entertaining, but what a strangeness it was to Laetitia!  His face would have been half under an antique bonnet.  It came very close to hers, and the scrutiny he bent on her was most solicitous.

After the service, he avoided the great ladies by sauntering up to within a yard or two of where she sat; he craved her hand on his arm to lead her forth by the park entrance to the church, all the while bending to her, discoursing rapidly, appearing radiantly interested in her quiet replies, with fits of intentness that stared itself out into dim abstraction.  She hazarded the briefest replies for fear of not having understood him.

One question she asked:  “Miss Durham is well, I trust?”

And he answered “Durham?” and said, “There is no Miss Durham to my knowledge.”

The impression he left with her was, that he might yesterday during his ride have had an accident and fallen on his head.

She would have asked that, if she had not known him for so thorough an Englishman, in his dislike to have it thought that accidents could hurt even when they happened to him.

He called the next day to claim her for a walk.  He assured her she had promised it, and he appealed to her father, who could not testify to a promise he had not heard, but begged her to leave him to have her walk.  So once more she was in the park with Sir Willoughby, listening to his raptures over old days.  A word of assent from her sufficed him.  “I am now myself,” was one of the remarks he repeated this day.  She dilated on the beauty of the park and the Hall to gratify him.