happier moments, reflected. She had now dragged on the weary load of time
throughout the winter; and the early and soft spring was already
abroad--smoothing the face of the waters, and calling life into the
boughs. Hitherto this time of the year had possessed a mysterious and
earnest attraction for Lucilla--now all its voices were mute. The letters
that Godolphin had written to her were so few, and so restrained, in
comparison with those which she had received in the former periods of
absence, that--ever alive as she was to impulse, and unregulated by
settled principles of hope--her only relief to a tearful and spiritless
dejection was in paroxysms of doubt, jealousy, and despair.

It is the most common thing in the world, that, when we have once wronged
a person, we go on in the wrong, from a certain soreness with which
conscience links the associations of the injured party. And thus,
Godolphin, struggling with the return to his early and never-forgotten
love, felt an unwillingness that he could seldom successfully combat, in
playing the hypocrite to Lucilla. His very remorse made him unkind; the
feeling that he ought to write often, made him write seldom: and
conscious that he ought to return her expressions of eager devotion, he
returned them with involuntary awkwardness and reserve. All this is very
natural, and very evident to us; but a thousand mysteries were more
acceptable to, more sought for and more clung to, by Lucilla, than a
conjecture at the truth.

Meanwhile she fed more and more eagerly on those vain researches which yet
beguiled her time, and flattered her imagination. In a science so false,
and so unprofitable, it mattered, happily, little, whether or not the poor
disciple laboured with success; but I need scarcely tell to any who have
had the curiosity to look over the entangled schemes and quaint figures of
the art, how slender was the advancement of the daughter in the learning