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em at that point." "Do you like Sir Edmund?" "I wish you would not ask me." "Why?" "Because he hates me, and I won't own to a _passion malheureuse_. He nearly overturned poor Mr. Farnley to-day at dinner, in trying to avoid the chair next me." "Oh, no; it was in trying to get the one next Miss Middleton," observed Rosa Moore, with an Innocent expression of countenance. Mrs. Ernsley continued without noticing the interruption, otherwise than by a downward movement of the corners of her mouth--"I had a thousand times rather be hated by him, than be liked in the way in which he seems to like any one, _qui lui tombe sous la main_." "No doubt," said Henry; "next to being loved there is nothing like being hated." "You think so too, then?" said Mrs. Ernsley. "Certainly," he replied. "It gratifies one of the strongest tastes, or rather passions, of one's nature; that of feeling emotion one's self, and exciting it in others. If I could not see the woman I loved agitated by her love for me, I had rather see her tremble, shudder eyen at my presence, than look as if Mr. Manby had come into the room." "What a detestable lover you would make!" exclaimed Mrs. Ernsley. "Always, by your own admission, on the verge of hatred." He laughed, and said, "It is an old saying, that love and hatred are closely allied." "Not more so than hatred and contempt," I said; "and in incurring the one, one might, perhaps, gain the other." Both my companions looked at me with surprise, for I had not joined before in their conversation, and a secret feeling (I was aware of it) had given a shade of bitterness to my manner of saying it. Mrs. Ernsley seemed to take the remark as personal to herself; but said good-humouredly, though somewhat sneeringly, "Since Miss Middleton has pronounced so decided an opinion, we had better drop the subject. What is become of Edward Middleton, Mr. Lovell?" "He has been abroad for some months," replied Henry; and Sir Edmund Ardern, who at that moment joined us, said, "The last time I saw him was at Naples last February; we had just made an excursion into the mountains of Calabria together." "A very unromantic one, no doubt," said Mrs. Ernsley, "as everything is in our unromantic days. Not a trace of a brigand or of an adventure I suppose?" "None that we were concerned in. But we saw an ex-brigand, and he told us his adventures." "Did he really?" exclaimed Miss Farnley; "and was h
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