“Pray, how does it stand?  Have you any hopes to put all to rights again?”

“Yes, Harry, I think, with your assistance, much may be done.”

“Oh, count upon me by all means,” said I, with a sneering bitterness, that my uncle could not have escaped remarking, had his attention not been drawn off by Lady Callonby.

What have I done—­what sin did I meditate before I was born, that I should come into the world branded with failure in all I attempt?  Is it not enough that my cousin, my elder by some months, should be rich while I am poor—­honoured and titled, while I am unknown and unnoticed?—­but is he also to be preferred to me in every station in life?  Is there no feeling of the heart so sacred that it must not succumb to primogeniture?

“What a dear old man Sir Guy is,” said Catherine, interrupting my sad reflections, “and how gallant; he is absolutely flirting with Lady Jane.”

And quite true it was.  The old gentleman was paying his devoirs with a studied anxiety to please, that went to my very heart as I witnessed it.  The remainder of that day to me was a painful and suffering one.  My intention of suddenly leaving Munich had been abandoned, why, I knew not.  I felt that I was hoping against hope, and that my stay was only to confirm, by the most “damning proof,” how surely I was fated to disappointment.  My reasonings all ended in one point.  If she really love Guy, then my present attentions can only be a source of unhappiness to her; if she do not, is there any prospect that from the bare fact of my attachment, so proud a family as the Callonbys will suffer their daughter to make a mere “marriage d’inclination?”

There was but one answer to this question, and I had at last the courage to make it:  and yet the Callonbys had marked me out for their attentions, and had gone unusually out of their way to inflict injury upon me, if all were meant to end in nothing.  If I only could bring myself to think that this was a systematic game adopted by them, to lead to the subsequent arrangement with my cousin!—­if I could but satisfy my doubts on this head——­What threats of vengeance I muttered, I cannot remember, for I was summoned at that critical moment to attend the party to the palace.

The state of excitement I was in, was an ill preparative for the rigid etiquette of a court dinner.  All passed off, however, happily, and the king, by a most good-natured allusion to the blunder of the night before, set me perfectly at ease on that head.

I was placed next to Lady Jane at dinner; and half from wounded pride, half from the momentarily increasing conviction that all was lost, chatted away gaily, without any evidence of a stronger feeling than the mere vicinity of a pretty person is sure to inspire.  What success this game was attended with I know not; but the suffering it cost me, I shall never cease to remember.  One satisfaction I certainly did experience —­she was manifestly piqued,