e went to Kilmarnock, thinking it better to make his approaches
by degrees. Were he to present himself at once at the castle and
be refused admittance, he would hardly know how to repeat his
application or to force himself upon her presence. From Kilmarnock he
wrote to her, saying that business connected with his ministrations
during the coming autumn had brought him into her beautiful
neighbourhood, and that he could not leave it without paying his
respects to her in person. With her permission he would call upon
her on the Thursday at about noon. He trusted that the state of her
health would not prevent her from seeing him, and reminded her that
a clergyman was often as welcome a visitor at the bedside of the
invalid, as the doctor or the nurse. He gave her no address, as he
rather wished to hinder her from answering him, but at the appointed
hour he knocked at the castle-door.

Need it be said that Lizzie's state of health was not such as to
preclude her from seeing so intimate a friend as Mr. Emilius? That
she was right to avoid by any effort the castigation which was to
have fallen upon her from the tongue of the learned serjeant, the
reader who is not straight-laced will be disposed to admit. A lone
woman, very young, and delicately organised! How could she have stood
up against such treatment as was in store for her? And is it not the
case that false pretexts against public demands are always held to be
justifiable by the female mind? What lady will ever scruple to avoid
her taxes? What woman ever understood her duty to the State? And this
duty which was required of her was so terrible, that it might well
have reduced to falsehood a stouter heart than her own. It can hardly
be reckoned among Lizzie's great sins that she did not make that
journey up to London. An appearance of sickness she did maintain,
even with her own domestics. To do as much as that was due even to
the doctor whom she had cajoled out of the certificate, and who
was afterwards frightened into maintaining it. But Mr. Emilius was
her clergyman,--her own clergyman, as she took care to say to her
maid,--her own clergyman, who had come all the way from London to be
present with her in her sickness; and of course she would see him.

Lizzie did not think much of the coming autumnal ministration at
Kilmarnock. She knew very well why Mr. Emilius had undertaken the
expense of a journey into Scotland in the middle of the London
season. She had been maim