coquetry, then coquetry, as I once told her, was the last female
accomplishment that could charm me in any woman whom I really loved.
However, these causes of annoyance and regret--her caprices, and my
remonstrances--all passed happily away, as the term of my engagement
with Mr. Sherwin approached its end, Margaret's better and lovelier
manner returned. Occasionally, she might betray some symptoms of
confusion, some evidences of unusual thoughtfulness--but I remembered
how near was the day of the emancipation of our love, and looked on
her embarrassment as a fresh charm, a new ornament to the beauty of my
maiden wife.

Mr. Mannion continued--as far as attention to my interests went--to be
the same ready and reliable friend as ever; but he was, in some other
respects, an altered man. The illness of which he had complained
months back, when I returned to London, seemed to have increased. His
face was still the same impenetrable face which had so powerfully
impressed me when I first saw him, but his manner, hitherto so quiet
and self-possessed, had now grown abrupt and variable. Sometimes, when
he joined us in the drawing-room at North Villa, he would suddenly
stop before we had exchanged more than three or four words, murmur
something, in a voice unlike his usual voice, about an attack of spasm
and giddiness, and leave the room. These fits of illness had something
in their nature of the same secrecy which distinguished everything
else connected with him: they produced no external signs of
distortion, no unusual paleness in his face--you could not guess what
pain he was suffering, or where he was suffering it. Latterly, I
abstained from ever asking him to join us; for the effect on Margaret
of his sudden attacks of illness was, naturally, such as to discompose
her seriously for the remainder of the evening. Whenever I saw him
accidentally, at later periods of the year, the influence of the