h a walk of half a mile in a dark night and under other
circumstances would not have seemed a grateful proposition, yet at
present, when the squire's imagination had only pictured to him the
alternatives of passing the night in the carriage or of crawling on foot
to Bath, it seemed but a very insignificant hardship; and tucking his
daughter's arm under his own, while in a kind voice he told Clifford "to
support her on the other side," the squire ordered the footman to lead
the way with Clifford's horse, and the coachman to follow or be d---d,
whichever he pleased.

In silence Clifford offered his arm to Lucy, and silently she accepted
the courtesy. The squire was the only talker; and the theme he chose was
not ungrateful to Lucy, for it was the praise of her lover. But Clifford
scarcely listened, for a thousand thoughts and feelings contested within
him; and the light touch of Lucy's hand upon his arm would alone have
been sufficient to distract and confuse his attention. The darkness of
the night, the late excitement, the stolen kiss that still glowed upon
his lips, the remembrance of Lucy's flattering agitation in the scene
with her at Lord Mauleverer's, the yet warmer one of that unconscious
embrace, which still tingled through every nerve of his frame, all
conspired with the delicious emotion which he now experienced at her
presence and her contact to intoxicate and inflame him. Oh, those
burning moments in love, when romance has just mellowed into passion,
and without losing anything of its luxurious vagueness mingles the
enthusiasm of its dreams with the ardent desires of reality and earth!
That is the exact time when love has reached its highest point,--when
all feelings, all thoughts, the whole soul, and the whole mind, are
seized and engrossed,--when every difficulty weighed in the opposite
scale seems lighter than dust,--when to renounce the object beloved is
the most deadly and lasting sacrifice,--and when in so many breasts,
where honour, conscience, virtue, are far stronger than we can believe
them ever to have been in a criminal like Clifford, honour, conscience,
virtue, have perished at once and suddenly into ashes before that mighty
and irresistible fire.

The servant, who had had previous opportunities of ascertaining the
topography of the "public" of which he spake, and who was perhaps
tolerably reconciled to his late terror in the anticipation of renewing
his intimacy with "the spirits of the past,"