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, and several times turned towards the person
on the other side of her, to avoid the tone of indifference in which I
discussed matters that were actually wringing my own heart at the moment.
Yet such was the bitterness