uld wear her hair in
no way that would hide them, unless she had hidden her forehead
altogether under a bush of frizzy fluffy curls. There was a faded look
about her complexion, too, which she had never before discovered--a
wanness, a yellowness. Yes, these things meant age! In such a spirit,
perchance, did Elizabeth of England survey the reflection in her
mirror, until all the glories of her reign seemed as nothing to her
when weighed against this dread horror of fast-coming age. And luckless
Mary, cooped up in the narrow rooms at Fotheringay, may have deemed
captivity, and the shadow of doom, as but trifling ills compared with
the loss of youth and beauty. Once to have been exquisitely beautiful,
the inspiration of poets, the chosen model of painters, and to see the
glory fading--that, for a weak woman, must be sorrow's crown of sorrow.

Anon dim feelings of jealousy began to gnaw Pamela's heart. She grew
watchful of her husband's attentions to other women, suspicious of
looks and words that meant no more than a man's desire to please.
Society no longer made her happy. Her Tuesday afternoons lost their
charm. There was poison in everything. Lady Ellangowan's flirting ways,
which had once only amused her, now tortured her. Captain Winstanley's
devotion to this lively matron, which had heretofore seemed only the
commoner's tribute of respect to the peeress, now struck his wife as a
too obvious infatuation for the woman. She began to feel wretched in
the society of certain women--nay, of all women who were younger, or
possibly more attractive, than herself. She felt that the only security
for her peace would be to live on a desert island with the husband she
had chosen. She was of too weak a mind to hide these growing doubts and
ever-augmenting suspicions. The miserable truth oozed out of her in
foolish little speeches; those continual droppings that wear the
hardest stone, and which wore even the adamantine surface of the
Captain's tranquil temper. There was a homoeopathic admixture of this
jealous poison in all the food he ate. He could rarely get through a
_tete-a-tete_ breakfast or dinner undisturbed by some invidious remark.

One day the Captain rose up in his strength, and grappled with this
jealous demon. He had let the little speeches, the random shots, pass
unheeded until now; but on one particularly dismal morning, a bleak
March morning, when the rain beat against the windows, and the deodoras
and cypresses we