o take from their hiding-place, and examine
once more--partly for her mother's amusement, partly for her own; for it
was a whim of hers to judge of character by hand-writing, and she really
had been quite interested in the character which both Miss Vanbrugh and
her brother had drawn.

"How strange that he should have been so near us, and we not know the
fact! He seems quite to haunt us--to be our evil genius--our Daimon!"

"Hush, my dear! it is wrong to talk so. Remember, too, that he is Sara's
husband."

Olive did remember it. Jestingly though she spoke, there was in her
a remembrance, as mournful as a thing so long ended could be, of that
early friendship, whose falseness had been her loving, heart's first
blight. She had never formed another. There was a unity in her nature
which made it impossible to build the shrine of a second affection on
the ruins of the first. She found it so, even in life's ordinary ties.
What would it have been with her had she ever known the great mystery of
love?

She never had known it. She had lived all these years with a heart as
virgin as mountain snows. When the one sweet dream which comes to most
in early maidenhood--the dream of loving and being loved--was crushed,
her heart drew back within itself, and, after a time of suffering almost
as deep as if for the loss of a real object instead of a mere ideal, she
prepared herself for her destiny. She went out into society, and there
saw men, as they are _in society_--feeble, fluttering coxcombs, hard,
grovelling men of business, some few men of pleasure, or of vice; and,
floating around all, the race of ordinary mankind, neither good nor bad.
Out of these classes, the first she merely laughed at, the second she
turned from with distaste, the third she abhorred and despised, the
fourth she looked upon with a calm indifference. Some good and clever
men she had met occasionally, towards whom she had felt herself drawn
with a friendly inclination; but they had always been drifted from her
by the ever-shifting currents of society.

And these, the exceptions, were chiefly old, or at least elderly
persons; men of long-acknowledged talent, wise and respected heads of
families. The "new generation," the young men out of whose community her
female acquaintances were continually choosing lovers and husbands, were
much disliked by Olive Rothesay. Gradually, when she saw how mean
was the general standard of perfection, how ineffably beneath her o