At their next meeting she was “Miss Dale”.

A week later he was closeted with her father.

Mr. Dale, in the evening of that pregnant day, eulogized Sir Willoughby as a landlord.  A new lease of the cottage was to be granted him on the old terms, he said.  Except that Sir Willoughby had congratulated him in the possession of an excellent daughter, their interview was one of landlord and tenant, it appeared; and Laetitia said, “So we shall not have to leave the cottage?” in a tone of satisfaction, while she quietly gave a wrench to the neck of the young hope in her breast.  At night her diary received the line:  “This day I was a fool.  To-morrow?”

To-morrow and many days afterwards there were dashes instead of words.

Patience travelled back to her sullenly.  As we must have some kind of food, and she had nothing else, she took to that and found it dryer than of yore.  It is a composing but a lean dietary.  The dead are patient, and we get a certain likeness to them in feeding on it unintermittingly overlong.  Her hollowed cheeks with the fallen leaf in them pleaded against herself to justify her idol for not looking down on one like her.  She saw him when he was at the Hall.  He did not notice any change.  He was exceedingly gentle and courteous.  More than once she discovered his eyes dwelling on her, and then he looked hurriedly at his mother, and Laetitia had to shut her mind from thinking, lest thinking should be a sin and hope a guilty spectre.  But had his mother objected to her?  She could not avoid asking herself.  His tour of the globe had been undertaken at his mother’s desire; she was an ambitious lady, in failing health; and she wished to have him living with her at Patterne, yet seemed to agree that he did wisely to reside in London.

One day Sir Willoughby, in the quiet manner which was his humour, informed her that he had become a country gentleman; he had abandoned London, he loathed it as the burial-place of the individual man.  He intended to sit down on his estates and have his cousin Vernon Whitford to assist him in managing them, he said; and very amusing was his description of his cousin’s shifts to live by literature, and add enough to a beggarly income to get his usual two months of the year in the Alps.  Previous to his great tour, Willoughby had spoken of Vernon’s judgement with derision; nor was it entirely unknown that Vernon had offended his family pride by some extravagant act.  But after their return he acknowledged Vernon’s talents, and seemed unable to do without him.

The new arrangement gave Laetitia a companion for her walks.  Pedestrianism was a sour business to Willoughby, whose exclamation of the word indicated a willingness for any amount of exercise on horseback; but she had no horse, and so, while he hunted, Laetitia and Vernon walked, and the neighbourhood speculated on the circumstances, until the ladies Eleanor and Isabel Patterne engaged her more frequently for carriage exercise, and Sir Willoughby was observed riding beside them.