ad caused him. This letter
finished, he threw himself upon his bed once again, and after a space,
slept more soundly than he had done for many a long night before. When
he rose in the morning he read over his letter, and felt, as he read,
some faint misgivings; but these were put to flight by the recollection
of Emily, as she had appeared to him in the vision of the previous
night. As the post, however, did not go out till evening, he would keep
the letter till then. Alas for the delay! It changed for ever his own
fate and that of Emily Sherwood. It chanced that very afternoon that,
taking up a provincial newspaper in a coffee-room into which he had
strolled, on his way to the post-office, the following paragraph met his
eye:--'We understand that there is a matrimonial alliance in
contemplation between J---- R----, Esq., eldest son of Sir J---- R----,
Bart., and the lovely and accomplished Miss Sherwood, daughter of
Colonel Sherwood, late of the --th dragoons, and granddaughter of the
late R. Sherwood, Esq., of ---- Park.' On reading this most unfounded
rumor, Philip Hayforth waited not another moment, but rushed home as if
driven by the furies; and tearing his letter in a thousand pieces, threw
it and the purse, Emily's gift, into the fire, and vowed to bestow not
another thought on the heartless woman who had perjured her own faith
and sold his true and fervent love for riches and title. Oh how he
scorned her! how he felt in his own true heart that all the wealth and
grandeur of the earth would have been powerless to tempt one thought of
his from her!

To conceal all suspicion of his sufferings from the world, and, if
possible, banish their remembrance from his own mind, he now went even
more than formerly into society; and when there, simulated a gayety of
manner that had hitherto distinguished his most vivacious moments. He
had always been a general favorite, and now his company was more sought
after than ever. Among the young persons of the opposite sex with whom
his engagements most frequently brought him in contact, was a young girl
of the name of Fanny Hartley, pretty, gentle, excessively amiable, but
without much mind, and with no literary taste whatever. She had nothing
to say, but she listened to him, and he felt in her society a sort of
repose, which was at present peculiarly grateful to his angry, troubled
spirit. Her very silence soothed him, while the absorbing nature of his
own feelings prevented him at