was the object with which I desired this interview; but I have extended
my confidence farther than I proposed."

I assured her it was not misplaced.

"I do not believe that it is," she replied. "You have that in your face
and manners which authorises trust. Let us continue to be friends. You
need not fear," she said, laughing, while she blushed a little, yet
speaking with a free and unembarrassed voice, "that friendship with us
should prove only a specious name, as the poet says, for another feeling.
I belong, in habits of thinking and acting, rather to your sex, with
which I have always been brought up, than to my own. Besides, the fatal
veil was wrapt round me in my cradle; for you may easily believe I have
never thought of the detestable condition under which I may remove it.
The time," she added, "for expressing my final determination is not
arrived, and I would fain have the freedom of wild heath and open air
with the other commoners of nature, as long as I can be permitted to
enjoy them. And now that the passage in Dante is made so clear, pray go
and see what has become of the badger-baiters. My head aches so much that
I cannot join the party."

I left the library, but not to join the hunters. I felt that a solitary
walk was necessary to compose my spirits before I again trusted myself in
Rashleigh's company, whose depth of calculating villany had been so
strikingly exposed to me. In Dubourg's family (as he was of the reformed
persuasion) I had heard many a tale of Romish priests who gratified, at
the expense of friendship, hospitality, and the most sacred ties of
social life, those passions, the blameless indulgence of which is denied
by the rules of their order. But the deliberate system of undertaking the
education of a deserted orphan of noble birth, and so intimately allied
to his own family, with the perfidious purpose of ultimately seducing
her, detailed as it was by the intended victim with all the glow of
virtuous resentment, seemed more atrocious to me than the worst of the
tales I had heard at Bourdeaux, and I felt it would be extremely
difficult for me to meet Rashleigh, and yet to suppress the abhorrence
with which he impressed me. Yet this was absolutely necessary, not only
on account of the mysterious charge which Diana had given me, but because
I had, in reality, no ostensible ground for quarrelling with him.

I therefore resolved, as far as possible, to meet Rashleigh's
dissimulation with equ