, and her distaste to the world in which she now lived, pleasant. She found that she could there be accommodated with board and lodging, and there she would now have remained if Mrs. Molyneux had not, when she understood her project, insisted on her returning to London with her after finishing their tour.—"Go with me however," said she, "the rest of our journey, and till we meet the Castlenorths, who are to be in town in October; and then if you have this rural passion still so strong upon you, you shall take your own way." Though there was little appearance of affection in this invitation,

Celestina thought she ought not to decline it, and therefore, though meeting the Castlenorths was what she most solicitously wished to avoid, she determined to go with her friend to town, that she might not give her any pretence for forgetting her entirely, or incur the censure of the world for leaving abruptly the only protection she could claim.


THE return of Mr. and Mrs. Molyneux to London was postponed from time to time till November. Lord Castlenorth had been too ill to set out on his journey to England at the time he proposed, and the family meeting which was to settle all that related to the marriage was now delayed till after Christmas. Willoughby however testified no impatience: he had promised to meet his sister and her husband in town on their arrival; but instead of doing so, he sent such an insufficient excuse as must have appeared very strange to Matilda had she thought much about it; but immersed in pleasures and pursuits of her own, she gave herself very little time to reflect on her brother's conduct, and was far from supposing that he absented himself

because he could not see Celestina without encreasing and confirming a passion which he had many reasons against indulging, and of which he was determined to cure himself by absence and reflection. The negociation with his uncle, which had been carried so far by his mother, he neither declined nor forwarded; but suffered it to remain nearly on the footing she had left it, flattering himself that by the time Miss Fitz-Hayman arrived in London, he should have so far conquered his early attachment as to have an heart as well as the hand, which he had promised to his mother's entreaties, to offer her.
Though his endeavours to forget Celestina had hitherto been quite unsuccessful, he had however acquired so much resolution as to determine not to see her, till the arrival of his destined wife, and the final settlement of every thing that related
