Mr. Cecil Burleigh had no clear resolve of what he would do when he went to walk in the garden the next morning. He knew what he wanted. A sort of paradoxical exhilaration possessed him. He remembered his dear Julia with tender, weary regret, and gave his fancy license to dwell on the winsomeness of Bessie. And while it was so dwelling he heard her tuneful tongue as she came with Miss Burleigh over the grass, still white with hoar-frost where the sun had not fallen. He advanced to meet them.
"Oh, Cecil, here you are! Mr. Fairfax has been inquiring for you, but there is no hurry," said his sister, and she was gone.
Bessie wore a broad shady hat, yet not shady enough to conceal the impetuous blushes that mantled her cheeks on her companion's evasion. She felt what it was the prelude to. Mr. Cecil Burleigh, inspired with the needful courage by these fallacious signs, broke into a stammering eloquence of passion that was yet too plain to be misunderstood--not reflecting, he, that maiden blushes may have more sources than one. The hot torrent of Bessie's rose from the fountain of indignation in her heart--indignation at his inconstancy to the sweet lady who she knew loved him, and his impertinence in daring to address herself when she knew he loved that lady. She silently confessed that to this upshot his poor pretences of wooing had tended from the first, and that she had been wilfully half blind and wholly unbelieving--so unwilling are proud young creatures to imagine that their best feelings can be traded on--but she was none the less wrathful and scornful as she lifted her eyes, dilated with tears, to his, and sweeping him a curtsey turned away without a single word--without a single word, yet never was wooer more emphatically answered.
They parted and went different ways. Bessie, thinking she would give all she was worth that he had held his peace and let her keep her dream of pity and sympathy, took the shrubbery path to the village and Miss Hague's cottage-lodgings; and Mr. Cecil Burleigh, repenting too late the vain presumption that had reckoned on her youth and ignorance, apart from the divining power of an honest soul, walked off to Norminster to rid himself of his heavy sense of mortification and discomfiture.