Page:The Naval Officer (1829), vol. 3.djvu/225

 the driver of which told me I had been gone about an hour. I drove off to town, wholly unaware that I had been observed by any one, much less by Emily. When she related to her father what she had seen, he either disbelieved or affected to disbelieve it, and treated it as the effects of a distempered mind, the phantoms of a disordered imagination; and she at length began to coincide with him.

I started for the continent a few days afterwards. Talbot, who had seen little of Clara since my rejection by Emily, and subsequent illness, offered my father to accompany me; and Clara was anxious that he should go, as she was determined not to listen to any thing he could say during my affliction; she could not, she said, be happy, while I was miserable, and gave him no opportunity of conversing with her on the subject of their union.

We arrived at Paris; but so abstracted was I in thought, that I neither saw nor heard any