part rendered any advance impossible." Poor Emily shrank from
transgressing what her parents represented as the limits due to delicacy
and decorum, and she would have died rather than have been guilty of a
real impropriety, or have appeared unfeminine in the eyes of Philip
Hayforth; and yet it did often suggest itself to her mind--rather,
however, in the shape of an undefined feeling than of a conscious
thought--that the shortest, best, most straight-forward way of
proceeding, was to write at once to Mr. Hayforth, and ask an
explanation. She could not herself see clearly how this could be wrong;
but she supposed it must be so, and she acknowledged her own ignorance
and inexperience. Emily was scarcely twenty; just at the age when an
inquiring and thoughtful mind can no longer rely with the unquestioning
faith of childhood on assertions sanctioned merely by authority, and
when a diffident one is too timid to venture to trust to its own
suggestions. It is only after much experience, or one of those bitter
mistakes, which are the great lessons of life, that such a character
learns that self-reliance, exercised with deliberation and humility, is
the only safeguard for individual rectitude. Emily, therefore, did not
write, but lived on in the silent, wasting agony of constant expectation
and perpetual disappointment. Her mother, in the hope of affording her
some relief, inquired in a letter she was writing to her relative in
London, if the latter had lately seen Mr. Hayforth. The answer was like
a death-blow to poor Emily. Her mother's correspondent had "met Mr.
Hayforth walking with a lady. He had passed her with a very stiff bow,
and seemed inclined to avoid her. He had not called for a long time. She
could not at all understand it." Colonel Sherwood could now no longer
contain his indignation. He forbade the mention of Philip Hayforth's
name, declaring that "his Emily was far too good and beautiful for the
wife of a low-born tradesman, and that he deserved the indignity now
thrown upon his family for ever having thought of degrading it by the
permission of such a union. And his darling child would, he knew, bear
up with the spirit of the Sherwoods." Poor Emily had, it is to be
feared, little of the spirit of the Sherwoods, but she tried to bear up
from perhaps as good a motive. But it was a difficult task, for she was
well-nigh broken-hearted. She now never mentioned Philip Hayforth, and
to all appearance her connection w