same day she had scarcely been a moment absent from his thoughts. Not
that this had been at all the case during the whole of his absence from
Cacouna. On the contrary, he had, in spite of his ill-humour at
starting, found so many agreeable distractions in the course of his
journey that, at the end of a week, he congratulated himself on being
entirely cured of a very foolish and troublesome fancy. No sooner,
however, had they begun their return--taking, it is true; a different
route, and continuing to visit new places--than it appeared that the
cure was not yet entirely complete; still he paid little attention to
the returning symptoms, and suffered them to increase unchecked till, at
the commencement of their last day's journey, the magnet had resumed all
its former power, and he became positively impatient to find himself
again at the Cottage.

Mr. Percy was not by any means so much in love as to be blind to the
extreme inconvenience and impolicy of anything like a serious love
affair with a little Canadian girl such as Lucia Costello; but in the
meantime she attracted him delightfully, and he always trusted to good
luck for some means of extrication, if matters should go a step further
than he intended. As for the possibility of her suffering, that did not
enter into his calculations; there would, of course, be some tears, and
she would look prettier than ever through them; but women always shed
tears and always wipe them away again, and forget them. So he came back
quite prepared to enjoy the two or three weeks which still remained to
him, by spending as many hours daily, as possible, in pursuit of what he
knew at the bottom of his heart he neither expected nor wished to
retain, when it was once gained.

The pleasure of rivalling and mortifying Maurice had been, at first, one
of Percy's strongest incentives in his attentions to Lucia; and as he