nversation flavoured her speech. The signs unfamiliar about
her for me were marks of the fire she had come out of; the struggle, the
torture, the determined sacrifice, through pride's conception of duty.
She was iron once. She had come out of the fire finest steel.

'Riversley! Harry,' she murmured, and my smile, and word, and squeeze in
reply, brought back a whole gleam of the fresh English morning she had
been in face, and voice, and person.

Was it conceivable that we could go back to Riversley single?

Before that was answered she had to make a statement; and in doing it she
blushed, because it involved Edbury's name, and seemed to involve her
attachment to him; but she paid me the compliment of speaking it frankly.
It was that she had felt herself bound in honour to pay Edbury's debts.
Even by such slight means as her saying, 'Riversley, Harry,' and my kiss
of her fingers when a question of money was in debate, did we burst aside
the vestiges of mutual strangeness, and recognize one another, but with
an added warmth of love. When I pleaded for the marriage to be soon, she
said, 'I wish it, Harry.'

Sentiment you do not obtain from a Damascus blade. She most cordially
despised the ladies who parade and play on their sex, and are for ever
acting according to the feminine standard:--a dangerous stretch of
contempt for one less strong than she.

Riding behind her and Temple one day with the princess, I said, 'What
takes you most in Janet?'

She replied, 'Her courage. And it is of a kind that may knot up every
other virtue worth having. I have impulses, and am capable of
desperation, but I have no true courage: so I envy and admire, even if I
have to blame her; for I know that this possession of hers, which
identifies her and marks her from the rest of us, would bear the ordeal
of fire. I can imagine the qualities I have most pride in withering and
decaying under a prolonged trial. I cannot conceive her courage failing.
Perhaps because I have it not myself I think it the rarest of precious
gifts. It seems to me to imply one half, and to dispense with the other.'

I have lived to think that Ottilia was right. As nearly right, too, in
the wording of her opinion as one may be in three or four sentences
designed to be comprehensive.

My Janet's readiness to meet calamity was shown ere we reached home upon
an evening of the late autumn, and set eye on a scene, for her the very
saddest that could have been devised to