alliance, he had no right to be disappointed and angry because he got nothing more. I was his own vanity and jealousy and selfishness that had wrought his own unhappiness. She did not think he could have appreciated her love if she had given it to him; but Gerald Staunton—who deserved everything and had received nothing—whom she thought of so constantly, who had been banished from England, and sent to die in that pestiferous climate, all on her account; his prospects blighted, his usefulness destroyed, his talent wasted, all because she had not had the courage and the honesty to break through her detested engagement and betroth herself to him for any length of time, or live with him in the humblest circumstances;—Gerald Staunton she had grievously wronged. It appeared to her now, looking back on her past, as if it had been the easiest thing in the world to do—so much easier than the miserable life she had endured so long. The one thing she had not had—love—assumed an importance in her eyes greater than it deserved; all her reading and all her thinking fostered the idea that it was the only thing worth living for, and that without it all pleasures were like apples of Sodom that turned to dust and ashes between the teeth.
When on a visit to her aunt, Lady Gower, she
