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