y.

It was a benevolent and merciful restriction, no doubt, that debarred
our first parents from re-entering the paradise they had forfeited.
Better far to carry away unsullied and unfaded the sweet sad memories
of the Happy Land, than revisit it to find weeds grown rank, fountains
dry, the skies darkened, the song of birds hushed, its bloom faded off
the flower, and its glory departed from the day.

She used to sit here in the shade with _him_. There was the very tree.
Even the broken chair they had laughed at was not mended, and yet for
her a century ago could not have seemed a more hopeless past. Other
springs would bloom with coming years, other summers glow, and she
could not doubt that many another worshipper would kneel humbly and
gratefully at her shrine, but their votive garlands could never more
glisten with the fresh dew of morning, the fumes from their lower
altars, though they might lull the senses and intoxicate the brain,
could never thrill like that earlier incense, with subtle sudden
poison to her heart.

To be sure, on more than one occasion she had walked here with Dick
Stanmore too. It was but human nature, I suppose, that she should have
looked on that gentleman's grievances from a totally different point
of view. It couldn't be half so bad in his case, she argued, men had
so many resources, so many distractions. She was sorry for him, of
course, but he couldn't be expected to feel a disappointment of this
nature like a woman, and, after all, theirs was more a flirtation
than an attachment. He need not have minded it so very much, and had
probably fancied he cared a great deal more than he really did.

It is thus we are all prone to reason, gauging the tide of each
other's feelings by the ebb and flow of our own.

Love, diffused amongst the species, is the best and purest of
earthly motives, concentrated on the individual it seems but a dual
selfishness after all.

There were few occupants of the Gardens; here two or three
nursery-maids and children, there a foreign gentleman reading a
newspaper. Occasionally, in some rare sequestered nook, an umbrella,
springing up unnecessarily and defiantly like a toadstool, above
two male legs and a muslin skirt. Lady Bearwarden passed on, with a
haughty step, and a bitter smile.

There is something of freemasonry in sorrow. Dorothea's vague
abstracted gait arrested Maud's attention even from a distance, and
involuntarily the delicate lady followed on t