He loathed the fellow, fought the fellow. But he was one with
the poet upon that prevailing theme of verse, the charms of women. He
was, to his ill-luck, intensely susceptible, and where he led men after
him to admire, his admiration became a fury. He could see at a glance
that Horace De Craye admired Miss Middleton. Horace was a man of taste,
could hardly, could not, do other than admire; but how curious that in
the setting forth of Clara and Miss Dale, to his own contemplation and
comparison of them, Sir Willoughby had given but a nodding approbation
of his bride's appearance! He had not attached weight to it recently.
Her conduct, and foremost, if not chiefly, her having been discovered,
positively met by his friend Horace, walking on the high-road without
companion or attendant, increased a sense of pain so very unusual with
him that he had cause to be indignant. Coming on this condition, his
admiration of the girl who wounded him was as bitter a thing as a man
could feel. Resentment, fed from the main springs of his nature, turned
it to wormwood, and not a whit the less was it admiration when he
resolved to chastise her with a formal indication of his disdain. Her
present gaiety sounded to him like laughter heard in the shadow of the
pulpit.
"You have escaped!" he said to her, while shaking the hand of his
friend Horace and cordially welcoming him. "My dear fellow! and, by the
way, you had a squeak for it, I hear from Flitch.
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