saying that he was forced, by an indispensable engagement, to refuse himself the honour of waiting upon Miss Joddrel.

'Run to him again!—' cried Elinor, with vehemence; 'run, or he will be gone! Make him enter the first empty room, and tell him 'tis Miss Ellis alone who desires to speak with him. Fly!'

Yet more earnestly, now, Juliet would have interfered; but the peremptory Elinor insisted upon immediate obedience. 'If still,' she cried 'he come not ... I shall conclude you to be already married!'

She laughed, yet wore a face of horrour at this idea; and spoke no more till Mrs Golding returned, with intelligence that Mr Harleigh was waiting in the parlour.

The bosom of Juliet now swelled and heaved high, with tumultuous distress and alarm, and her cheeks were dyed with the crimson tint of conscious shame; while Elinor, turning pale, dropt her head upon the pillow of the sofa, and sighed deeply for a moment in silence. Recovering then, 'This, at least,' she said, 'is explicit; let it be final! Your influence is not disguised; use it, Ellis, to snatch me from the deplorable buffoonery of running about the world—not like death after the lady, but the lady after death! Assure yourselves that you will never devise any stratagem that will turn me from my purpose; though you may render ridiculous in its execution, what in its conception was sublime. Happiness such as yours, Ellis, ought to be above all narrow malignity. You ought to be proud, Ellis, voluntarily to serve her whom involuntarily you have ruined!'[Pg 563]

[Pg 563]

Juliet was beginning some protestations of kindness; but Elinor, interrupting her, said, 'I can give credit only to action. I must have a conference; but it is not to talk of myself;—nor of you; nor even of Harleigh. No! the soft moment of indulgence to my feelings is at an end! When I allowed my heart that delicious expansion; when I abandoned it to nature, and permitted it those open effusions of tenderness, I thought my dissolution at hand, and meant but to snatch a few last precious minutes of extacy from everlasting annihilation! but these endless delays, these eternal procrastinations, make me appear so unmeaning an idiot, even to myself, that, for the remnant of my doleful ditty, I must resist every natural wish; and plod on, till I plod off, with the stiff and stupid decorum of a starched old maid of half a century. Procure me, however, this definitive conference. It is upon no point of the old story, I promise you. You cannot be more tired of 

 Prev. P 24/135 next