There goes the
dinner-bell, and here comes my aunt to scold me for sitting here at my
desk all day, instead of staying with the company: wish the company
were--gone.

CHAPTER XIX

Twenty Second: Night.--What have I done? and what will be the end of it?
I cannot calmly reflect upon it; I cannot sleep. I must have recourse to
my diary again; I will commit it to paper to-night, and see what I shall
think of it to-morrow.

I went down to dinner resolving to be cheerful and well-conducted, and
kept my resolution very creditably, considering how my head ached and how
internally wretched I felt. I don't know what is come over me of late;
my very energies, both mental and physical, must be strangely impaired,
or I should not have acted so weakly in many respects as I have done; but
I have not been well this last day or two. I suppose it is with sleeping
and eating so little, and thinking so much, and being so continually out
of humour. But to return. I was exerting myself to sing and play for
the amusement, and at the request, of my aunt and Milicent, before the
gentlemen came into the drawing-room (Miss Wilmot never likes to waste
her musical efforts on ladies' ears alone). Milicent had asked for a
little Scotch song, and I was just in the middle of it when they entered.
The first thing Mr. Huntingdon did was to walk up to Annabella.

'Now, Miss Wilmot, won't you give us some music to-night?' said he. 'Do
now! I know you will, when I tell you that I have been hungering and
thirsting all day for the sound of your voice. Come! the piano's
vacant.'

It was, for I had quitted it immediately upon hearing his petition. Had
I been endowed with a proper degree of self-possession, I should have
turned to the lady myself, and cheerfully joined my entreaties to his,
whereby I should have disappointed his expectations, if the affront had
been purposely given, or made him sensible of the wrong, if it had only
arisen from thoughtlessness; but I felt it too deeply to do anything but
rise from the music-stool, and throw myself back on the sofa, suppressing
with difficulty the audible expression of the bitterness I felt within.
I knew Annabella's musical talents were superior to mine, but that was no
reason why I should be treated as a perfect nonentity. The time and the
manner of his asking her appeared like a gratuitous insult to me; and I
could have wept with pure vexation.

Meantime, she exultingly seated hersel