and searched for pity in her
eyes, but found neither look nor recognition, nor any other sentiment; for
all this she walked and walked, till all the other promenaders were tired
and gone--then her culprit summoned resolution, and taking off his hat,
with a voice for the first time tremulous, besought permission to address
her.

She stopped, blushed, and neither acknowledged nor disowned his
acquaintance. He blushed, stammered out how ashamed he was, how he
deserved to be punished, how he was punished, how little she knew how
unhappy he was, and concluded by begging her not to let all the world know
the disgrace of a man who was already mortified enough by the loss of her
acquaintance.

She asked an explanation; he told her of the action that had been
commenced in her name; she gently shrugged her shoulders and said, "How
stupid they are!" Emboldened by this, he begged to know whether or not a
life of distant, unpretending devotion would, after a lapse of years,
erase the memory of his madness--his crime!

"She did not know!"

"She must now bid him adieu, as she had preparations to make for a ball in
the Crescent, where everybody was to be."

They parted, and Dolignan determined to be at the ball, where everybody
was to be. He was there, and after some time he obtained an introduction
to Miss Haythorn, and he danced with her. Her manner was gracious. With
the wonderful tact of her sex, she seemed to have commenced the
acquaintance that evening.

That night, for the first time, Dolignan was in love. I will spare the
reader all a lover's arts, by which he succeeded in dining where she
dined, in dancing where she danced, in overtaking her by accident when she
rode. His devotion followed her to church, where the dragoon was rewarded
by learning there is a world where they neither polk nor smoke--the two
capital abominations of this one.

He made an acquaintance with her uncle, who liked him, and he saw at last
with joy that her eye loved to dwell upon him, when she thought he did
not observe her. It was three months after the Box Tunnel that Captain
Dolignan called one day upon Captain Haythorn, R.N., whom he had met twice
in his life, and slightly propitiated by violently listening to a
cutting-out expedition; he called, and in the usual way asked permission
to pay his addresses to his daughter.

The worthy captain straightway began doing quarter-deck, when suddenly he
was summoned from the apartment by a mysterio