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Rh vigour of age, should have sued to her who was also the fair idol of his own awakened fancy, in vain. It appeared to him as if nature had formed them for each other, that inclination on the part of each had united them, but that the contrarieties of human life had opposed to separate them.

In thus reflecting, how slender seemed his pretensions, how arrogant the hope of one day obtaining that hand which had been refused a Douglas! His mother's ambition, and overflowing fondness for him, had buoyed him up with hopes, the fallacy of which now lay exposed before him. In the dispirited state of his mind, he thought Rosilia might be no longer what he once knew her; that in growing to years of maturity, while her personal charms had become more strongly developed, those of her mind might have lost; and she perhaps no longer retained that sweetness, that softness, which in her tender years she lavished upon him as her playmate, when his young heart, throbbing with affection, became bewitched by her endearments.

Since those days, though few had been his opportunities of seeing her, when he did so, he little conceived her mild yet discouraging manners, calculated as they seemed to diminish his expectation of success as a suitor, arose from imperfections