Chapter 19 - Page 2

love from its earliest days, that
the moment of parting was generally a crisis in affairs of the heart, and,
with a backwardness occasioned by her modesty, had rather avoided than
sought an opportunity to favor the colonel's wishes. Egerton had no been
over anxious to come to the point, and everything was left as heretofore:
neither, however, appeared to doubt in the least the state of the other's'
affections; and there might be said to exist between them one of those not
unusual engagements by implication which it would have been, in their own
estimation, a breach of faith to recede from, but which, like all other
bargains that are loosely made, are sometimes violated when convenient.
Man is a creature that, as experience has sufficiently proved, it is
necessary to keep in his proper place in society by wholesome
restrictions; and we have often thought it a matter of regret that some
well understood regulations did not exist by which it became not only
customary, but incumbent on him, to proceed in his road to the temple of
Hymen. We know that it is ungenerous, ignoble, almost unprecedented, to
doubt the faith, the constancy, of a male paragon; yet, somehow, as the
papers occasionally give us a sample of such infidelity; as we have
sometimes seen a solitary female brooding over her woes in silence, and,
with the seemliness of feminine decorum shrinking from the discovery of
its cause, or which the grave has revealed for the first time, we cannot
but wish that either the watchfulness of the parent, or a sense of
self-preservation in the daughter, would, for the want of a better, cause
them to adhere to those old conventional forms of courtship which require
a man to speak to be understood, and a woman to answer to be committed.

There was a little parlor in the house of Sir Edward Moseley, that was the
privileged retreat of none but the members of his own family. Here the
ladies were accustomed to withdraw into the bosom of their domestic
quietude, when occasional visitors had disturbed their ordinary
intercourse; and many were the hasty and unreserved communications it had
witnessed between the sisters, in their stolen flights from the graver
scenes of the principal apartments. It might be aid to be sacred to the
pious feelings of the domestic affections. Sir Edward would retire to it
when fatigued with his occupations, certain of finding some one of those
he loved to draw his thoughts off from the cares of life to the little
incidents of his children's happiness; and Lady Moseley, even in the
proudest hours of her reviving splendor, seldom passed the door without
looking in, with a smile, on the faces she might find there. It was, in
fact, the room in the large mansion of the baronet, expressly devoted, by