He no longer implored her; he put the case on common ground.

And he wound up:  “Pray do not be ruthless, my girl.”

The practical statement, and this adjuration incongruously to conclude it, harmonized with her disordered understanding, her loss of all sentiment and her desire to be kind.  She sighed to herself.  “Happily, it is over!”

Her father was too weak to rise.  He fell asleep.  She was bound down to the house for hours; and she walked through her suite, here at the doors, there at the windows, thinking of Clara’s remark “of a century passing”.  She had not wished it, but a light had come on her to show her what she would have supposed a century could not have effected:  she saw the impossible of overnight a possible thing:  not desireable, yet possible, wearing the features of the possible.  Happily, she had resisted too firmly to be again besought.

Those features of the possible once beheld allured the mind to reconsider them.  Wealth gives us the power to do good on earth.  Wealth enables us to see the world, the beautiful scenes of the earth.  Laetitia had long thirsted both for a dowering money-bag at her girdle, and the wings to fly abroad over lands which had begun to seem fabulous in her starved imagination.  Then, moreover, if her sentiment for this gentleman was gone, it was only a delusion gone; accurate sight and knowledge of him would not make a woman the less helpful mate.  That was the mate he required:  and he could be led.  A sentimental attachment would have been serviceless to him.  Not so the woman allied by a purely rational bond:  and he wanted guiding.  Happily, she had told him too much of her feeble health and her lovelessness to be reduced to submit to another attack.

She busied herself in her room, arranging for her departure, so that no minutes might be lost after her father had breakfasted and dressed.

Clara was her earliest visitor, and each asked the other whether she had slept, and took the answer from the face presented to her.  The rings of Laetitia’s eyes were very dark.  Clara was her mirror, and she said:  “A singular object to be persecuted through a night for her hand!  I know these two damp dead leaves I wear on my cheeks to remind me of midnight vigils.  But you have slept well, Clara.”

“I have slept well, and yet I could say I have not slept at all, Laetitia.  I was with you, dear, part in dream and part in thought:  hoping to find you sensible before I go.”

“Sensible.  That is the word for me.”

Laetitia briefly sketched the history of the night; and Clara said, with a manifest sincerity that testified of her gratitude to Sir Willoughby:  “Could you resist him, so earnest as he is?” Laetitia saw the human nature, without sourness:  and replied, “I hope, Clara, you will not begin with a large stock of sentiment, for there is nothing like it for making you hard, matter-of-fact, worldly, calculating.”