true
lovers; whilst no match-making mamma, fortune-hunting younger brother,
or girl of business on the look-out for a good establishment, should be
allowed a glimpse of it at any price.

CHAPTER XXXVII -- THE FORLORN HOPE

"--Cumberland seeks thy hand;
His shall it be--nay, no reply;
Hence till those rebel eyes be dry."
_The Lord of the Isles_.

FREDDY COLEMAN was cheated of his walk that afternoon; for an old maiden
lady in the neighbourhood, having read in a Sunday paper that the plague
was raging with great fury at Constantinople, thought it as well to be
prepared for the worst, and summoned Mr. Coleman to receive directions
about making her will--and he, being particularly engaged, sent Freddy
in his stead, who set out on the mission in a state of comic ill-humour,
which bid fair to render Mrs. Aikinside's will a very original document
indeed, and foreboded for that good old lady herself an unprecedented
and distracting afternoon.

I had assisted Mr. Coleman in conducting Clara Saville to the carriage
which arrived to convey her to Barstone, and had received a kind glance
and a slight pressure of the hand in return, which I would not have
exchanged for the smiles of an empress, when, anxious to be alone with
my own thoughts, I started off for a solitary walk, nor did I relax my
pace till I had left all traces of human habitation far behind me,
and green fields and leafless hedges were my only companions. I then
endeavoured in some measure to collect my scattered thoughts, and to
reflect calmly on the position in which I had placed myself, by the
avowal the unexpected events of the morning had hurried me into. But so
much was I excited, that calm reflection appeared next to impossible.
Feeling--flushed with the victory it had obtained over its old
antagonist, Reason--seemed, in every sense of the word, to have gained
the day, and, despite all the ~289~~ difficulties that lay before
me--difficulties which I knew must appear all but insurmountable,
whenever I should venture to look them steadily in the face--the one
idea that Clara Saville loved me was ever present with me, and rendered
me supremely happy.

The condition of loving another better than one's self, conventionally
termed being "in love," is, to say the least, a very doubtful kind of
happiness; and poets have therefore, with great propriety, described
it as "pleasing pain," "delicious misery," and in man