"Make, then, no further enquiry, for now all explanation would be
useless. That we _were_ parted, we know, though _why_ we cannot tell:
but that again we shall ever meet---"

She, stopt; her streaming eyes cast upwards, and a deep sigh bursting
from her heart.

"Oh what," cried Delvile, endeavouring to take her hand, which she
hastily withdrew from him, "what does this mean? loveliest, dearest
Cecilia, my betrothed, my affianced wife! why flow those tears which
agony only can wring from you? Why refuse me that hand which so lately
was the pledge of your faith? Am I not the same Delvile to whom so few
days since you gave it? Why will you not open to him your heart? Why
thus distrust his honour, and repulse his tenderness? Oh why, giving
him such exquisite misery, refuse him the smallest consolation?"

"What consolation," cried the weeping Cecilia, "can I give? Alas! it is
not, perhaps, _you_ who most want it!--"

Here the door was opened by one of the Miss Charltons, who came into
the room with a message from her grandmother, requesting to see
Cecilia. Cecilia, ashamed of being thus surprised with Delvile, and in
tears, waited not either to make any excuse to him, or any answer to
Miss Charlton, but instantly hurried out of the room;--not, however, to
her old friend, whom now less than ever she could meet, but to her own
apartment, where a very short indulgence of grief was succeeded by the
severest examination of her own conduct.

A retrospection of this sort rarely brings much subject of exultation,