country. A week later
we heard that the girl's marriage would be put off for several
months,--partly on account of her mourning, and partly because her
mother, whose only companion she had now become, could not bear to part
with her at the time originally fixed and actually so near. People of
course looked at each other,--said it was the beginning of the end,
a "dodge" of Ambrose Tester's. I wonder they did n't accuse him of
poisoning the poor old general. I know to a certainty that he had
nothing to do with the delay, that the proposal came from Lady Emily,
who, in her bereavement, wished, very naturally, to keep a few months
longer the child she was going to lose forever. It must be said, in
justice to her prospective son-in-law, that he was capable either of
resigning himself or of frankly (with however many blushes) telling
Joscelind he could n't keep his agreement, but was not capable of trying
to wriggle out of his difficulty. The plan of simply telling Joscelind
he couldn't,--this was the one he had fixed upon as the best, and this
was the one of which I remarked to him that it had a defect which should
be counted against its advantages. The defect was that it would kill
Joscelind on the spot.

I think he believed me, and his believing me made this unexpected
respite very welcome to him. There was no knowing what might happen in
the interval, and he passed a large part of it in looking for an issue.
And yet, at the same time, he kept up the usual forms with the girl whom
in his heart he had renounced. I was told more than once (for I had lost
sight of the pair during the summer and autumn) that these forms were at
times very casual, that he neglected Miss Bernardstone most flagrantly,
and had quite resumed his old intimacy with Lady Vandeleur. I don't
exactly know what was meant by this, for she spent the first three
months of her widowhood in complete seclusion, in her own old house
in Norfolk, where he certainly was not staying with her. I believe he
stayed some time, for the partridge shooting, at a place a few miles
off. It came to my ears that if Miss Bernardstone did n't take the hint
it was because she was determined to stick to him through thick and
thin. She never offered to let him off, and I was sure she never would;
but I was equally sure that, strange as it may appear, he had not ceased
to be nice to her. I have never exactly understood why he didn't hate
her, and I am convinced that he was not a com