s if Death
had spared them for Love, and that Love should lead them together through
life's long journey to the gates of Death?

Never! never! never! Their fates were fixed. For him, poor insect as he
was, a solitary flight by day, and a return at evening to his wingless
mate! For her--he thought he saw her doom.

Could he give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless egotist,
who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining net all
around her? Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly. He could not
perhaps have spread his character out in set words, as we must do for
him, for it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to describe analytically
what we know as soon as we see it; but he felt in his inner consciousness
all that we must tell for him. Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing,
capable of winning a woman infinitely above himself, incapable of
understanding her,--oh, if he could but touch him with the angel's spear,
and bid him take his true shape before her whom he was gradually
enveloping in the silken meshes of his subtle web! He would make a place
for her in the world,--oh yes, doubtless. He would be proud of her in
company, would dress her handsomely, and show her off in the best lights.
But from the very hour that he felt his power over her firmly
established, he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly pattern.
He would dismantle her of her womanly ideals, and give her in their place
his table of market-values. He would teach her to submit her
sensibilities to her selfish interest, and her tastes to the fashion of
the moment, no matter which world or half-world it came from. "As the
husband is, the wife is,"--he would subdue her to what he worked in.

All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the wife of
Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he did, from the
few times he had seen him. He would be rich by and by, very probably.
He looked like one of those young men who are sharp, and hard enough to
come to fortune. Then she would have to take her place in the great
social exhibition where the gilded cages are daily opened that the
animals may be seen, feeding on the sight of stereotyped toilets and the
sound of impoverished tattle. O misery of semi-provincial fashionable
life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an
existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the
piquant profligacy which s