His reverie had thrown him into severe commotion.  The slave of a passion thinks in a ring, as hares run:  he will cease where he began.  Her sweetness had set him off, and he whirled back to her sweetness:  and that being incalculable and he insatiable, you have the picture of his torments when you consider that her behaviour made her as a cloud to him.

Riding slack, horse and man, in the likeness of those two ajog homeward from the miry hunt, the horse pricked his cars, and Willoughby looked down from his road along the bills on the race headed by young Crossjay with a short start over Aspenwell Common to the ford.  There was no mistaking who they were, though they were well-nigh a mile distant below.  He noticed that they did not overtake the boy.  They drew rein at the ford, talking not simply face to face, but face in face.  Willoughby’s novel feeling of he knew not what drew them up to him, enabling him to fancy them bathing in one another’s eyes.  Then she sprang through the ford, De Craye following, but not close after—­and why not close?  She had flicked him with one of her peremptorily saucy speeches when she was bold with the gallop.  They were not unknown to Willoughby.  They signified intimacy.

Last night he had proposed to De Craye to take Miss Middleton for a ride the next afternoon.  It never came to his mind then that he and his friend had formerly been rivals.  He wished Clara to be amused.  Policy dictated that every thread should be used to attach her to her residence at the Hall until he could command his temper to talk to her calmly and overwhelm her, as any man in earnest, with command of temper and a point of vantage, may be sure to whelm a young woman.  Policy, adulterated by temper, yet policy it was that had sent him on his errand in the early morning to beat about for a house and garden suitable to Dr. Middleton within a circuit of five, six, or seven miles of Patterne Hall.  If the Rev. Doctor liked the house and took it (and Willoughby had seen the place to suit him), the neighbourhood would be a chain upon Clara:  and if the house did not please a gentleman rather hard to please (except in a venerable wine), an excuse would have been started for his visiting other houses, and he had that response to his importunate daughter, that he believed an excellent house was on view.  Dr. Middleton had been prepared by numerous hints to meet Clara’s black misreading of a lovers’ quarrel, so that everything looked full of promise as far as Willoughby’s exercise of policy went.

But the strange pang traversing him now convicted him of a large adulteration of profitless temper with it.  The loyalty of De Craye to a friend, where a woman walked in the drama, was notorious.  It was there, and a most flexible thing it was:  and it soon resembled reason manipulated by the sophists.  Not to have reckoned on his peculiar loyalty was proof of the blindness cast on us by temper.

And De Craye had an Irish tongue; and he had it under control, so that he could talk good sense and airy nonsense at discretion.  The strongest overboiling of English Puritan contempt of a gabbler, would not stop women from liking it.  Evidently Clara did like it, and Willoughby thundered on her sex.  Unto such brainless things as these do we, under the irony of circumstances, confide our honour!