I proposed to go and cheer the Captain in his solitude.
The unhappy wretch was greatly as I had left him. He was perhaps a little gaunter from his fretfulness. But his knee was not easier, nor his heart more peaceable.
"Captain," I announced myself as sweetly as could be, "I know you to be mortal dull in this extremity. Therefore if I can I am come to cheer you in it. And I have a deal of compassion for you."
The Captain could not quite conceal his look of pleasure, and, reading it, I took the tone and speech I had used to be exceeding pat to the occasion.
"How good of you, my Lady Barbara," says he, with a gratefulness I knew to be sincere, "to think of me in my affliction; nay, how good of you to think of me at all."
At first I was confounded that a man so shrewd and piercing in his mind as Captain Grantley, should be so disarmed with my simple airs, and be so unsuspicious of a motive for them. But then a lover is very jealous of himself, and if the object of his adoration tells him to his face that she sometimes thinks about him, and proves the same by her presence at his side, he is so anxious to believe her that he the more readily persuades himself of her veracity. Besides, Beauty makes the wise man credulous. Sure it is hard to disbelieve her, else her amorous fibs and her sighing insincerities ne'er would have slain so many of the great figures of
