peculating on my impulsively
answering the very questions which he had just described himself as
resolved not to ask--that I evaded all reference to this part of the
subject with something like a feeling of confusion on my own part. At
the same time I was resolved not to lose even the smallest opportunity
of trying to plead Laura's cause, and I told him boldly that I
regretted his generosity had not carried him one step farther, and
induced him to withdraw from the engagement altogether.

Here, again, he disarmed me by not attempting to defend himself. He
would merely beg me to remember the difference there was between his
allowing Miss Fairlie to give him up, which was a matter of submission
only, and his forcing himself to give up Miss Fairlie, which was, in
other words, asking him to be the suicide of his own hopes. Her
conduct of the day before had so strengthened the unchangeable love and
admiration of two long years, that all active contention against those
feelings, on his part, was henceforth entirely out of his power. I
must think him weak, selfish, unfeeling towards the very woman whom he
idolised, and he must bow to my opinion as resignedly as he could--only
putting it to me, at the same time, whether her future as a single
woman, pining under an unhappily placed attachment which she could
never acknowledge, could be said to promise her a much brighter
prospect than her future as the wife of a man who worshipped the very
ground she walked on? In the last case there was hope from time,
however slight it might be--in the first case, on her own showing,
there was no hope at all.

I answered him--more because my tongue is a woman's, and must answer,
than because I had anything convincing to say. It was only too plain
that the course Laura had adopted the day before had offered him the
advantage if he chose to take it--and that he HAD chosen to take it. I
felt this at the time, and I feel it just as strongly now, while I
write these lines, in my own room. The one hope left is that his
motives really spring, as he says they do, from the irresistible
strength of his attachment to Laura.

Before I close my diary for to-night I must record that I wrote to-day,
in poor Hartright's interest, to two of my mother's old friends in
London--both men of influence and position. If they can do anything
for him, I am quite sure they will. Except Laura, I never was more
anxious about any one than I am now about Walter.