ties and proprieties of the match!
To consider it as the certain wish of every being who could hope to
influence you! Even if your own feelings were reluctant or
indifferent, to consider what powerful supports would be his! Was it
not enough to make the fool of me which I appeared? How could I look
on without agony? Was not the very sight of the friend who sat behind
you, was not the recollection of what had been, the knowledge of her
influence, the indelible, immoveable impression of what persuasion had
once done--was it not all against me?"

"You should have distinguished," replied Anne. "You should not have
suspected me now; the case is so different, and my age is so different.
If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to
persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded,
I thought it was to duty, but no duty could be called in aid here. In
marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred,
and all duty violated."

"Perhaps I ought to have reasoned thus," he replied, "but I could not.
I could not derive benefit from the late knowledge I had acquired of
your character. I could not bring it into play; it was overwhelmed,
buried, lost in those earlier feelings which I had been smarting under
year after year. I could think of you only as one who had yielded, who
had given me up, who had been influenced by any one rather than by me.
I saw you with the very person who had guided you in that year of
misery. I had no reason to believe her of less authority now. The
force of habit was to be added."

"I should have thought," said Anne, "that my manner to yourself might
have spared you much or all of this."

"No, no! your manner might be only the ease which your engagement to
another man would give. I left you in this belief; and yet, I was
determined to see you again. My spirits rallied with the morning, and
I felt that I had still a motive for remaining here."

At last Anne was at home again, and happier than any one in that house
could have conceived. All the surprise and suspense, and every other
painful part of the morning dissipated by this conversation, she
re-entered the house so happy as to be obliged to find an alloy in some
momentary apprehensions of its being impossible to last. An interval
of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of
everything dangerous in such high-wrought felicity; and she went to her
room, an