Sir Willoughby in the society of his daughter, when the young baronet revived to a sprightly boyishness immediately.  Indeed, as big boy and little girl, they had played together of old.  Willoughby had been a handsome, fair boy.  The portrait of him at the Hall, in a hat, leaning on his pony, with crossed legs, and long flaxen curls over his shoulders, was the image of her soul’s most present angel; and, as a man, he had—­she did not suppose intentionally—­subjected her nature to bow to him; so submissive was she, that it was fuller happiness for her to think him right in all his actions than to imagine the circumstances different.  This may appear to resemble the ecstasy of the devotee of Juggernaut, It is a form of the passion inspired by little princes, and we need not marvel that a conservative sex should assist to keep them in their lofty places.  What were there otherwise to look up to?  We should have no dazzling beacon-lights if they were levelled and treated as clod earth; and it is worth while for here and there a woman to be burned, so long as women’s general adoration of an ideal young man shall be preserved.  Purity is our demand of them.  They may justly cry for attraction.  They cannot have it brighter than in the universal bearing of the eyes of their sisters upon a little prince, one who has the ostensible virtues in his pay, and can practise them without injuring himself to make himself unsightly.  Let the races of men be by-and-by astonished at their Gods, if they please.  Meantime they had better continue to worship.

Laetitia did continue.  She saw Miss Durham at Patterne on several occasions.  She admired the pair.  She had a wish to witness the bridal ceremony.  She was looking forward to the day with that mixture of eagerness and withholding which we have as we draw nigh the disenchanting termination of an enchanting romance, when Sir Willoughby met her on a Sunday morning, as she crossed his park solitarily to church.  They were within ten days of the appointed ceremony.  He should have been away at Miss Durham’s end of the county.  He had, Laetitia knew, ridden over to her the day before; but there he was; and very unwontedly, quite surprisingly, he presented his arm to conduct Laetitia to the church-door, and talked and laughed in a way that reminded her of a hunting gentleman she had seen once rising to his feet, staggering from an ugly fall across hedge and fence into one of the lanes of her short winter walks.  “All’s well, all sound, never better, only a scratch!” the gentleman had said, as he reeled and pressed a bleeding head.  Sir Willoughby chattered of his felicity in meeting her.  “I am really wonderfully lucky,” he said, and he said that and other things over and over, incessantly talking, and telling an anecdote of county occurrences, and laughing at it with a mouth that would not widen.  He went on talking in the church porch, and murmuring softly some steps up the aisle, passing the pews of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson and Lady Busshe.  Of course he was entertaining, but what a strangeness it was to Laetitia!  His face would have been half under an antique bonnet.  It came very close to hers, and the scrutiny he bent on her was most solicitous.