that she remembered Miss Herbert had taken it away
to read in the garden. She proposed to send the servant to fetch it,
but this I would not permit, pretending at last to concur in her own
previously expressed contempt for the paragraph,--but secretly promising
myself to go in search of it the moment I should be at liberty,--and
once more she resumed the theme of my rashness, and my dangers, and
all the troubles I might possibly bring upon my family, and the grief I
might occasion my grandmother.

Now, as there are few men upon whom the ties of family and kindred
imposed less rigid bonds, I was rather provoked at being reminded of
obligations to my grandmother, and was almost driven to declare that she
weighed for very little in the balance of my plans and motives. The old
lady, however, rescued me from the indiscretion by a fervent entreaty
that I would at least ask a certain person what he thought of my present
step.

"Will you do this?" said she, with tears in her eyes. "Will you do it
now?"

I promised her faithfully.

"Will you do it here, sir, at this table, and let me have the proudest
memory in my life to recall the incident."

"I should like an hour or two for reflection," said I, pushed very hard
by this insistence of hers, for I was sorely puzzled whom I was to write
to.

"Oh," said she, still tearfully, "is it not the habit of hesitating,
sir, has cost your house so dearly?"

"No," said I, "we have been always accounted prompt in action and true
to our engagements."

Heaven forgive me! but in this vainglorious speech I was alluding to the
motto of the Potts crest,--"Vigilanti-bus omnia fausta;" or, as some one
rendered it, "Potts answers to the night-bell."

She smiled faintly at my remark. I wonder how she would have looked had
she read the thought that suggested it.

"But you _will_ write to him, sir?" said she, once more.

I laid my hand over what anatomists call the region of the heart, and
tried to look like Charles Edward in the prints. Meanwhile my patience
was beginning to fail me, and I felt that if the mystification were
to last much longer, I should infallibly lose my presence of mind.
Fortunately, the old lady was so full of her theme that she only asked
to be let talk away without interruption, with many an allusion to the
dear Count and the adored Duchess, and a fervent hope that I might be
ultimately reconciled to them both,--a wish which I had tact enough to
perceive required