luttered and flamed into grey ash, she turned
to her altar, and, extending her arm, called out aloud:

"I have done with it all for ever----"

And the next instant flinging herself upon her bed, she drew her brown
ringlets before her face, and under this veil wept for her broken
youth and her broken heart, and the hard cold life before her.

* * * * *

There is a kind of love a man can give to woman but once in his
lifetime: the love of the man in the first flush of manhood for the
woman he has chosen to be his mate, untransferable and never to be
forgotten: love of passion so exquisite, of devotion so pure, born of
the youth of the heart and belonging to an existence and personality
lost for ever. A man may wed again, and (some say) love again, but
between the boards of the coffin of his first wife--if he has loved
her--lie secrets of tenderness, and sweetness, and delight, which,
like the spring flowers, may not visit the later year.

But, notwithstanding this, a second wooing may have a charm and an
interest of its own, even the wooing which is to precede a marriage of
convenience.

So Rupert found. The thought of an alliance with Madeleine de Savenaye
was not only engrossing from the sense of its own intrinsic
advantages, but had become the actual foundation-stone of all his new
schemes of ambition.

Nay, more: such admiration and desire as he could still feel for
woman, he had gradually come to centre upon his fair and graceful
cousin, who added to her personal attractions the other indispensable
attributes, blood, breeding and fortune. Mr. Landale was as
essentially refined and fastidious in his judgment as he was
unmeasured in his ambition.

His error of precipitancy had been pardonable enough; and mere
self-reproach for an ill-considered manoeuvre would not have
sufficed to plunge him into such a depth of bitter and angry
despondency as that in which he now found himself. But the rebuff had
been too uncompromising to leave him a single hope. He was too shrewd
not to see that here was no pretty feminine nay, precursor of the
yielding yea, not to realise that Madeleine had meant what she said
and would abide by it. And, under the sting of the moment betrayed
into a degradingly ill-mannered outburst, he had shown that he
measured the full bearings of the position.

So, the wind still sat in that quarter!

Failing the mysterious smuggler, it was to be nobody with the Saven