would not have to feel frightened, as we do so often, about young
men's principles," continued aunt Dora, fixing her eyes with warning
significance on her nephew, and trying hard to open telegraphic
communications with him, "if more attention was paid at the universities
to give them sound guidance in their studies. So long as you are sound
in your principles, there is no fear of you," said the timid diplomatist,
trying to aid the warning look of her eyes by emphasis and inflection.
Poor Miss Dora! it was her unlucky fate, by dint of her very exertions
in smoothing matters, always to make things worse.

"He would be a bold man who would call those principles unsound which
have made my brother Gerald what he is," said, with an affectionate
admiration that became him, the Curate of St Roque's.

"It's a slavish system, notwithstanding Gerald," said Miss Leonora,
with some heat; "and a false system, and leads to Antichrist at the
end and nothing less. Eat your dinner, Frank--we are not going to
argue just now. We expected to hear that another of the girls was
engaged before we came away, but it has not occurred yet. I don't
approve of young men dancing about a house for ever and ever, unless
they mean something. Do you?"

Mr Wentworth faltered at this question; it disturbed his composure
more than anything that had preceded it. "I--really I don't know," he
said, after a pause, with a sickly smile--of which all three of his
aunts took private notes, forming their own conclusions. It was, as
may well be supposed, a very severe ordeal which the poor young man
had to go through. When he was permitted to say good-night, he went
away with a sensation of fatigue more overpowering than if he had
visited all the houses in Wharfside. When he passed the green door,
over which the apple-tree rustled in the dark, it was a pang to his
heart. How was he to continue to live--to come and go through that
familiar road--to go through all the meetings and partings, when this
last hopeless trial was over, and Lucy and he were swept apart as if
by an earthquake? If his lips were sealed henceforward, and he never
was at liberty to say what was in his heart, what would she think of
him? He could not fly from his work because he lost Skelmersdale; and
how was he to bear it? He went home with a dull bitterness in his
mind, trying, when he thought of it, to quiet the aching pulses which
throbbed all over him, with what ought to have been the hallow