well enough as a proverb applicable to cases
of friendship, though absence is not always necessary to hollowness
of heart, even between friends, and truth and honesty, like precious
stones, are perhaps most easily imitated at a distance, when the
counterfeits often pass for real. Love, however, is very materially
assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and
will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing
food. Thus it is, that it often attains its most luxuriant growth in
separation and under circumstances of the utmost difficulty; and thus it
was, that Nicholas, thinking of nothing but the unknown young lady, from
day to day and from hour to hour, began, at last, to think that he was
very desperately in love with her, and that never was such an ill-used
and persecuted lover as he.

Still, though he loved and languished after the most orthodox models,
and was only deterred from making a confidante of Kate by the slight
considerations of having never, in all his life, spoken to the object
of his passion, and having never set eyes upon her, except on two
occasions, on both of which she had come and gone like a flash of
lightning--or, as Nicholas himself said, in the numerous conversations
he held with himself, like a vision of youth and beauty much too bright
to last--his ardour and devotion remained without its reward. The young
lady appeared no more; so there was a great deal of love wasted (enough
indeed to have set up half-a-dozen young gentlemen, as times go, with
the utmost decency), and nobody was a bit the wiser for it; not even
Nicholas himself, who, on the contrary, became more dull, sentimental,
and lackadaisical, every day.

While matters were in this state, the failure of a correspondent of
the brothers Cheeryble, in Germany, imposed upon Tim Linkinwater and
Nicholas the necessity of going through some very long and complicated
accounts, extending over a considerable space of time. To get through
them with the greater dispatch, Tim Linkinwater proposed that they
should remain at the counting-house, for a week or so, until ten o'clock
at night; to this, as nothing damped the zeal of Nicholas in the
service of his kind patrons--not even romance, which has seldom business
habits--he cheerfully assented. On the very first night of these later
hours, at nine exactly, there came: not the young lady herself, but her
servant, who, being closeted with brother Charles for so