a. "Oh, she didn't
confess it. If she had, I shouldn't think so much of her. But she told me
as plain as though she had spoken it in words, before she left this
room."

Austen shook his head again.

"Phrasie," he said, "I'm afraid you've been building castles in Spain."
And he went out, and across to the stable to harness Pepper.

Austen did not believe Euphrasia. On that eventful evening when Victoria
had called at Jabe Jenney's, the world's aspect had suddenly changed for
him; old values had faded,--values which, after all, had been but tints
and glows,--and sterner but truer colours took their places. He saw
Victoria's life in a new perspective,--one in which his was but a small
place in the background of her numerous beneficences; which was, after
all, the perspective in which he had first viewed it. But, by degrees,
the hope that she loved him had grown and grown until it had become
unconsciously the supreme element of his existence,--the hope that stole
sweetly into his mind with the morning light, and stayed him through the
day, and blended into the dreams of darkness.

By inheritance, by tradition, by habits of thought, Austen Vane was an
American,--an American as differentiated from the citizen of any other
nation upon the earth. The French have an expressive phrase in speaking
of a person as belonging to this or that world, meaning the circle by
which the life of an individual is bounded; the true American recognizes
these circles--but with complacency, and with a sure knowledge of his
destiny eventually to find himself within the one for which he is best
fitted by his talents and his tastes. The mere fact that Victoria had
been brought up amongst people with whom he had nothing in common would
not have deterred Austen Vane from pressing his suit; considerations of
honour had stood in the way, and hope had begun to whisper that these
might, in the end, be surmounted. Once they had disappeared, and she
loved him, that were excuse and reason enough.

And suddenly the sight of Victoria with a probable suitor--who at once
had become magnified into an accepted suitor--had dispelled hope.
Euphrasia! Euphrasia had been deceived as he had, by a loving kindness
and a charity that were natural. But what so natural (to one who had
lived the life of Austen Vane) as that she should marry amongst those
whose ways of life were her ways? In the brief time in which he had seen
her and this other man, Austen's quickened pe