his dues.  We must teach her to make amends to him—­but don’t listen to Lady Busshe!  He was too young at twenty-three or twenty-four.  No young man is ever jilted; he is allowed to escape.  A young man married is a fire-eater bound over to keep the peace; if he keeps it he worries it.  At thirty-one or thirty-two he is ripe for his command, because he knows how to bend.  And Sir Willoughby is a splendid creature, only wanting a wife to complete him.  For a man like that to go on running about would never do.  Soberly—­no!  It would soon be getting ridiculous.  He has been no worse than other men, probably better—­infinitely more excusable; but now we have him, and it was time we should.  I shall see her and study her, sharply, you may be sure; though I fancy I can rely on his judgement.”

In confirmation of the swelling buzz, the Rev. Dr. Middleton and his daughter paid a flying visit to the Hall, where they were seen only by the members of the Patterne family.  Young Crossjay had a short conversation with Miss Middleton, and ran to the cottage full of her—­she loved the navy and had a merry face.  She had a smile of very pleasant humour according to Vernon.  The young lady was outlined to Laetitia as tall, elegant, lively; and painted as carrying youth like a flag.  With her smile of “very pleasant humour”, she could not but be winning.

Vernon spoke more of her father, a scholar of high repute; happily, a scholar of an independent fortune.  His maturer recollection of Miss Middleton grew poetic, or he described her in an image to suit a poetic end:  “She gives you an idea of the Mountain Echo.  Doctor Middleton has one of the grandest heads in England.”

“What is her Christian name?” said Laetitia.

He thought her Christian name was Clara.

Laetitia went to bed and walked through the day conceiving the Mountain Echo the swift, wild spirit, Clara by name, sent fleeting on a far half circle by the voice it is roused to subserve; sweeter than beautiful, high above drawing-room beauties as the colours of the sky; and if, at the same time, elegant and of loveable smiling, could a man resist her?  To inspire the title of Mountain Echo in any mind, a young lady must be singularly spiritualized.  Her father doated on her, Vernon said.  Who would not?  It seemed an additional cruelty that the grace of a poetical attractiveness should be round her, for this was robbing Laetitia of some of her own little fortune, mystical though that might be.  But a man like Sir Willoughby had claims on poetry, possessing as he did every manly grace; and to think that Miss Middleton had won him by virtue of something native to her likewise, though mystically, touched Laetitia with a faint sense of relationship to the chosen girl.  “What is in me, he sees on her.”  It decked her pride to think so, as a wreath on the gravestone.  She encouraged her imagination to brood over Clara, and invested her designedly with romantic charms, in spite of pain; the ascetic zealot hugs his share of Heaven—­most bitter, most blessed—­in his hair-shirt and scourge, and Laetitia’s happiness was to glorify Clara.  Through that chosen rival, through her comprehension of the spirit of Sir Willoughby’s choice of one such as Clara, she was linked to him yet.