A young physician of considerable practice, good connexions, gentlemanly manners, and prepossessing appearance, and who had long been known to and intimate with the family, in an interview with Mr. Williamson, declared his admiration for his daughter's virtues, and expressed an esteem for herself, that justified the father in sanctioning his request to be admitted as an acknowledged suitor for the young lady's hand; and his pretensions to her regards were supported by her father, who believed their congeniality of tempers would render such an alliance happy and prosperous.
Miss Williamson listened to the appeals of her admirer, we must admit, with satisfaction; and though his addresses were not distasteful, she felt a pang in her heart that plainly told her it was already possessed by another. It required but this spark to kindle the flame that had long been smoldering in her breast; and at the moment when, had she not known John Ferguson, she would have been pleased and flattered with the protestations of her suitor, she felt disappointed and distressed that those proposals had not emanated from another source. The very contemplation of this disappointment increased the warmth and ardour of her affection for young Ferguson, while it annihilated all thoughts of the other; and even, respecting as she did the wishes of her father, she could offer no encouragement to his medical friend. The young son of Galen, unacquainted as he was with the real state of the lady's feelings, attributed her taciturn abstraction to the innate modesty of her nature, and therefore delicately refrained from pressing proposals which he perceived she was not prepared to entertain. Contemplating the resumption of the subject at a future time, when the lady's mind would have in all probability recovered the shock, which he imagined was occasioned by the novelty of her situation, he left her, while he expressed the deepest devotion and unalterable attachment.
Shortly after this interview, the young men met at the table of their hospitable host; and there for the first time John Ferguson discovered the position in which the young physician stood to the family. He watched with a jealous eye the movements of his rival, who, though noticing a peculiarity in his young friend's manner, never dreamt of the true cause of his dejection. The contention in the breast of the lady was equally painful; for, while she divined the nature of Ferguson's melancholy, and was aware that the young doctor's attentions to her would lead her taciturn lover to imagine she was gratified with and encouraged them, she could give him no clue to her own feelings; while her devotion to parental authority deterred her from slighting her more voluble admirer, and her kind and amiable disposition shrank from assuming a state of feelings foreign to her nature. John Ferguson retired from the presence of his loved one, with a heavier heart than he had ever experienced before; and, after being the prey to a series of mental convulsions, at a late hour of the night he retired, not to sleep, but to a further meditation in a horizontal position. The morning dawned without any alleviation of his miseries, and, on the impulse of his natural impetuosity, he formed those plans which entirely altered the course of his subsequent prospects and career.