ended for me. In
point of fact he disapproves of me. Is not that it?' To this question
Montague did not feel himself called upon to make any immediate
answer. 'I can well understand that it should be so. An intimate
friend may like or dislike the friend of his friend, without offence.
But unless there be strong reason he is bound to be civil to his
friend's friend, when accident brings them together. You have told me
that Mr Carbury was your beau ideal of an English gentleman.'

'So he is.'

'Then why didn't he behave as such?' and Mrs Hurtle again smiled. 'Did
not you yourself feel that you were rebuked for coming here with me,
when he expressed surprise at your journey? Has he authority over
you?'

'Of course he has not. What authority could he have?'

'Nay, I do not know. He may be your guardian. In this safe-going
country young men perhaps are not their own masters till they are past
thirty. I should have said that he was your guardian, and that he
intended to rebuke you for being in bad company. I dare say he did
after I had gone.'

This was so true that Montague did not know how to deny it. Nor was he
sure that it would be well that he should deny it. The time must come,
and why not now as well as at any future moment? He had to make her
understand that he could not join his lot with her,--chiefly indeed
because his heart was elsewhere, a reason on which he could hardly
insist because she could allege that she had a prior right to his
heart;--but also because her antecedents had been such as to cause all
his friends to warn him against such a marriage. So he plucked up
courage for the battle. 'It was nearly that,' he said.

There are many--and probably the greater portion of my readers will be
among the number,--who will declare to themselves that Paul Montague was
a poor creature, in that he felt so great a repugnance to face this
woman with the truth. His folly in falling at first under the battery
of her charms will be forgiven him. His engagement, unwise as it was,
and his subsequent determination to break his engagement, will be
pardoned. Women, and perhaps some men also, will feel that it was
natural that he should have been charmed, natural that he should have
expressed his admiration in the form which unmarried ladies expect
from unmarried men when any such expression is to be made at all;--
natural also that he should endeavour to escape from the dilemma when
he found the manifold dangers of the s