CHAPTER V.

Helen's perfect happiness at Clarendon Park was not of long duration.
People who have not been by nature blessed or cursed with nice feelings, or
who have well rubbed off their delicacy in roughing through the world, can
be quite happy, or at least happy enough without ascertaining whether they
are really esteemed or liked by those with whom they live. Many, and some
of high degree, when well sheltered and fed, and provided with all
the necessaries, and surrounded by all the luxuries of life, and with
appearances tolerably well kept up by outward manner, care little or nought
about the inside sentiments.

But Helen was neither of the case-hardened philosophic, or the naturally
obtuse-feeling class; she belonged to the over-anxious. Surrounded at
Clarendon Park with all the splendour of life, and with the immediate
expectation of seeing and being seen by the first society in England; with
the certainty also of being tenderly loved and highly esteemed by two of
the persons she was living with, yet a doubt about the third began to make
her miserable. Whether General Clarendon really liked her or not, was a
question that hung upon her mind sometimes as a dead weight--then vibrating
backwards and forwards, she often called to mind, and endeavoured to
believe, what Cecilia the first day told her, that this reserved manner
was natural to him with strangers, and would wear off. But to her the icy
coldness did not thaw. So she felt, or so she fancied, and which it was
she could not decide. She had never before lived with any one about whose
liking for her she could doubt, therefore, as she said to herself, "I know
I am a bad judge." She feared to open her mind to Cecilia. Lady Davenant
would be the safest person to consult; yet Helen, with all her young
delicacy fresh about her, scrupled, and could not screw her courage to
the sticking-place. Every morning going to Lady Davenant's room, she half