"Besides, it is just possible that I may not marry her, and it is no good risking a cold (above all, at the beginning of winter) for nothing!" Fraught with this prudential policy, Mauleverer then resigned Lucy to her father, and murmuring in her ear that "her displeasure made him the most wretched of men," concluded his adieu by a bow penitentially graceful.
About five minutes afterwards, he himself withdrew.

As he was wrapping his corporeal treasure in his roquelaire of sables, previous to immersing himself in his chair, he had the mortification of seeing Lucy, who with her father, from some cause or other, had been delayed in the hall, handed to the carriage by Captain Clifford.

Had the earl watched more narrowly than in the anxious cares due to himself he was enabled to do, he would, to his consolation, have noted that Lucy gave her hand with an averted and cool air, and that Clifford's expressive features bore rather the aspect of mortification than triumph.
He did not, however, see more than the action; and as he was borne homeward with his flambeaux and footmen preceding him, and the watchful Smoothson by the side of the little vehicle, he muttered his determination of writing by the very next post to Brandon all his anger for Lucy and all his jealousy of her evident lover.
While this doughty resolve was animating the great soul of Mauleverer, Lucy reached her own room, bolted the door, and throwing herself on her bed, burst into a long and bitter paroxysm of tears.

So unusual were such visitors to her happy and buoyant temper, that there was something almost alarming in the earnestness and obstinacy with which she now wept.
"What!" said she, bitterly, "have I placed my affections upon a man of uncertain character, and is my infatuation so clear that an acquaintance dare hint at its imprudence?
And yet his manner--his tone! No, no, there can be no reason for shame in loving him!" And as she said this, her heart smote her for the coldness of her manner towards Clifford on his taking leave of her for the evening.

"Am I," she thought, weeping yet more vehemently than before,--"am I so worldly, so base, as to feel altered towards him the moment I hear a syllable breathed against his name?
Should I not, on the contrary, have clung to his image with a greater love, if he were attacked by others?
But my father, my dear father, and my kind, prudent uncle,--something is due to them; and they would break their hearts if I loved one whom they deemed unworthy.