He had asked her to be his wife simply in fulfilment of a death-bed promise! The more she thought of it the more bitter did the idea of it become to her.

And she could not also but think of her cousin.

Poor Will! He, at any rate, had loved her, though his eagerness in love had been, as she told herself, but short-lived.

As she thought of him, it seemed but the other day that he had been with her up on the rock in the park;--but as she thought of Captain Aylmer, to whom she had become engaged only yesterday, and from whom she had separated herself only that morning, she felt that an eternity of time had passed since she had parted from him.
On the following day, a dull, dark, melancholy day, towards the end of November, she went out to saunter about the park, leaving her father still in his bedroom, and after a while made her way down to the cottage.

She found Mrs.Askerton as usual alone in the little drawing-room, sitting near the window with a book in her hand; but Clara knew at once that her friend had not been reading,--that she had been sitting there looking out upon the clouds, with her mind fixed upon things far away.