discretion, and would never have been
suspected of discomfiture had she not spoken
of her daughter henceforth with suspicious
effusion. Then "society" smiled and knew
all about it, and felt that Mr. Mansergh
had been foolish indeed, but not immoderately,
not unpardonably so. Lady Caroline
was very popular and very much
admired, and had her only friend's life been
prolonged for a few years, until she had
passed the dangerous period of youth, she
might have been as worthy of esteem and
affection as she was calculated to inspire
admiration. But Mr. Mansergh died before
his wife was twenty-three years old, and
left her with a large fortune, brilliant
beauty, and just sufficient knowledge of
the world to enable her to detect and
despise its most salient snares, but with a
mind still but half educated, desultory
habits, and a wholly unoccupied heart.
Her grief for her husband's loss, if not
poignant and torturing, was at least
sincere, deep, and well founded. When he
died, she had said to herself that she should
never again have so true, so wise, and so
constant a friend; and she was right. Life
had many pleasant and some good things
in store for Lady Caroline Mansergh, but
such a love as that with which her husband
had loved her was not among them. She
acknowledged this always; the impression
did not fade away with the first vehemence
of grief—it lasted, and was destined to
deepen. She strayed into a bad "set"
before long, and to her youth and
impulsiveness, with her tendency to ennui, and
her sad freedom from all ties of attachment,
the step from feeling that no one was so
good as her husband had been, to believing
that no one else was good at all, was very
easy. And so Lady Caroline acquired a
dangerous and demoralising trick of
contempt for her fellows, which she hid under
a mask of light and careless good nature
indeed, and which was seriously offensive
to no one, but which condemned her,
nevertheless, to much interior solitude and
dreariness. That she was not of the world she
lived in, was due less to any exceptional
elevation of sentiment than to a capricious
and disdainful humour, which caused her
to dismiss her associates from her thoughts
after a brief scrutiny, in which their follies
and foibles came into strong light, and
the qualities which would have required
time and patience to find out remained
undiscovered.

It had occurred to Lady Caroline
Mansergh, on several occasions of late, to
wonder, whether she was destined ever to
experience the passion called love. She
had not remained ignorant of the science
of flirtation up to her present time of life,
but, she had not been beguiled, ever so
briefly, into mistaking any of her flirtations
for love. So she was accustomed to
wonder wearily, when in an unusually
desultory mood, whether she should ever
feel that there existed in the world a
human being for whom she should be
willing to suffer, with whom life would be
happy, without whom it would be
intolerable, and whose welfare she could
deliberately and practically prefer to her own.
Of late she had begun to think that fate
was against her in this particular. The
idea of the possibility of feeling love for
one of the men whom she was in the habit
of meeting, was quite preposterous; she
did not hold her favourite followers half so
dear as Jehui, her black barb, or like them
half so well as Gelert, her greyhound.
Her life would, doubtless, continue to be
the bright, fashionable, flimsy, careless,
rather ennuyé existence it had hitherto
been, and she should never know anything
of the power, the pain, the engrossing
influence of love. So much the better, she
would think, in her more hopeful moods;
it must be a narrowing kind of influence,
bounding all one's horizon within such small
limits, shutting up one's mortal vista with
one figure.

When the Lady Caroline dismissed her
maid, and resigned herself to reverie, on
this night, it was not, after her accustomed
fashion, to dwell in her thoughts on the
dulness, staleness, flatness, and
unprofitableness of the world in general, and the
section of it in which she lived, in particular.
She had quite a distinct subject for thought,
she had a figure and a face in her fancy, a
voice in her memory, which filled them
wholly. What if she had been wrong, if not
only love were coming to her, to fill her life
with delight, and turn its weariness with
purpose and meaning, but love at first sight?
A ridiculous notion, entertained by schoolgirls,
housemaids, novelists, and poets, but
scouted by all reasonable people of the world,
and "in society." She knew this, but she did
not care; there was a strange delicious thrill
about her heart, and in the swift flight of
her thoughts she swept the beams of happy
possibilities, and felt that she could, and
would, and did despise society and its
notions on this point.

What did she know about Walter Joyce?
Absolutely nothing, but that he was young,