!')

'Our first kiss shall seal your pardon, dearest, and not a word shall
pass to remind you of this distressing page in your history.'

('Distressing! Excellent fun it was. I shall make her hear my
diary, if I persuade myself to encounter this intolerable kiss of
peace. It will be a mercy if I don't serve her as the thief in the
fable did his mother when he was going to be hanged.')

'I will meet you at the station by any train on Saturday that you
like to appoint, and early next week we will go down to what I am
sure you have felt is your only true home.'

('Have I? Oh! she has heard of their journey, and thinks this my
only alternative. As if I could not go with them if I chose--I wish
they would ask me, though. They shall! I'll not be driven up to the
Holt as my last resource, and live there under a system of mild
browbeating, because I can't help it. No, no! Robin shall find it
takes a vast deal of persuasion to bend me to swallow so much pardon
in milk and water. I wonder if there's time to change the spooney
simplicity, and come out in something spicy, with a dash of the
Bloomer. But, maybe, there's some news of him in the other sheet,
now she has delivered her conscience of her rigmarole. Oh! here it
is--')

'Phoebe will go home with us, as she is, according to the family
system, not summoned to her sister's wedding. Robert leaves London
on Saturday morning, to fetch his books, &c., from Oxford, Mr.
Parsons having consented to give him a title for Holy Orders, and to
let him assist in the parish until the next Ember week. I think,
dear girl, that it should not be concealed from you that this step
was taken as soon as he heard that you had actually sailed for
Ireland, and that he does not intend to return until we are in the
country.'

('Does he not? Another act of coercion! I suppose you put him up to
this, madam, as a pleasing course of discipline. You think you have
the whip-hand of me, do you? Pooh! See if he'll stay at Oxford!')

'I feel for the grief I'm inflicting--'

('Oh, so you complacently think, "now I have made her sorry!"')

'--but I believe uncertainty, waiting, and heart sickness would cost
you far more. Trust me, as one who has felt it, that it is far
better to feel oneself unworthy than to learn to doubt or distrust