other subject.
Confide your interest to me; I will not betray it, providing you do not again
assume that vile cockade.«
    »No fear of that, considering the manner in which it has been recalled.
Adieu, Fergus; do not permit your sister to forget me.«
    »And adieu, Waverley; you may soon hear of her with a prouder title. Get
home, write letters, and make friends as many and as fast as you can; there will
speedily be unexpected guests on the coast of Suffolk, or my news from France
has deceived me.«65
    Thus parted the friends: Fergus returning back to his castle, while Edward,
followed by Callum Beg, the latter transformed from point to point into a Low-
groom, proceeded to the little town of --.
    Edward paced on under the painful and yet not altogether embittered feelings
which separation and uncertainty produce in the mind of a youthful lover. I am
not sure if the ladies understand the full value of the influence of absence,
nor do I think it wise to teach it them, lest, like the Clelias and Mandanes of
yore, they should resume the humour of sending their lovers into banishment.
Distance, in truth, produces in idea the same effect as in real perspective.
Objects are softened and rounded, and rendered doubly graceful; the harsher and
more ordinary points of character are mellowed down, and those by which it is
remembered are the more striking outlines that mark sublimity, grace, or beauty.
There are mists too in the mental as well as the natural horizon, to conceal
what is less pleasing in distant objects, and there are happy lights to stream
in full glory upon those points which can profit by brilliant illumination.
    Waverley forgot Flora Mac-Ivor's prejudices in her magnanimity, and almost
pardoned her indifference towards his affection, when he recollected the grand
and decisive object which seemed to fill her whole soul. She, whose sense of
duty so wholly engrossed her in the cause of a benefactor, - what would be her
feelings in favour of the happy individual who should be so fortunate as to
awaken them? Then came the doubtful question, whether he might not be that happy
man, - a question which fancy endeavoured to answer in the affirmative, by
conjuring up all she had said in his praise, with the addition of a comment much
more flattering than the text warranted. All that was common-place - all that
belonged to the every-day world - was melted away and obliterated in those
dreams of imagination, which only remembered with advantage the points of