, we try to forget each other, we
marry elsewhere? Can any man be to my dear as I have been? God forbid!
Can any woman be to me what she is? You shall marry her to the Prince of
Wales to-morrow, and it is a cowardice and treason. How can we, how can
you, undo the promises we have made to each other before Heaven? You may
part us: and she will die as surely as if she were Jephthah's daughter.
Have you made any vow to Heaven to compass her murder? Kill her if you
conceive your promise so binds you: but this I swear, that I am glad
you have come, so that I may here formally recall a hasty pledge which I
gave, and that, call me when she will, I will come to her!"

No doubt this speech was made with the flurry and agitation belonging
to Mr. Warrington's youth, and with the firm conviction that death would
infallibly carry off one or both of the parties, in case their worldly
separation was inevitably decreed. Who does not believe his first
passion eternal? Having watched the world since, and seen the rise,
progress, and--alas, that I must say it!--decay of other amours, I may
smile now as I think of my own youthful errors and ardours; but, if it
be a superstition, I had rather hold it; I had rather think that
neither of us could have lived with any other mate, and that, of all its
innumerable creatures, Heaven decreed these special two should be joined
together.

"We must come, then, to what I had fain have spared myself," says the
General, in reply to my outbreak; "to an unfriendly separation. When
I meet you, Mr. Warrington, I must know you no more. I must order--and
they will not do other than obey me--my family and children not to
recognise you when they see you, since you will not recognise in
your intercourse with me the respect due to my age, the courtesy of
gentlemen. I had hoped so far from your sense of honour, and the idea
I had formed of you, that, in my present great grief and perplexity,
I should have found you willing to soothe and help me as far as you
might--for, God knows, I have need of everybody's sympathy. But, instead
of help, you fling obstacles in my way. Instead of a friend--a gracious
Heaven pardon me!--I find in you an enemy! An enemy to the peace of my
home and the honour of my children, sir! And as such I shall treat you,
and know how to deal with you, when you molest me!"

And, waving his hand to me, and putting on his hat, Mr. Lambert hastily
quitted my apartment.

I was confounded, and bel