house these few days," said the Doctor, "in order to induce my young friend to do the same; because about four days since he took an inclination to ramble during the whole of the meridian sultry heat, and did not return till evening, so exhausted and weary, as to appear to me, by one day's indiscretion, to have entirely lost the benefit he had previously reaped from his sojourn amongst us."
"It was the day," thought Oriana, "that he received my letter!"
Although Philimore summoned up sufficient command to speak with tolerable composure, yet she observed a striking alteration in his countenance.
Leaving the Doctor to support the conversation alone, he rose, and flung himself into a seat immediately behind those whose scrutiny he was so anxious to shun, but which exactly faced the sisters; when, abandoning himself to the utmost despondence, his countenance became like alabaster, his eye fixed in vacuum, and had not one deep suffocating sigh escaped him, it might have been imagined that every sense and pulse was suspended,—that the despair of mind, induced by Oriana's letter, operating upon his physical organs, had chilled the genial current of his veins—"She could no longer suffer herself to hold intercourse with him unsanctioned by her parents!" Could such
