d; it seemed to creep
even into her heart, and make its beatings grow still. Down the long
road, where she and Harold had so often passed together, she walked
alone. Alone--as once had seemed her doom through life--and must now be
so unto the end.

It might be the _certainty_ of this which calmed her. She had no maiden
doubts or hopes; not one. The possibility of Harold's loving her, or
choosing her as his wife, never entered her mind.

Since the days of her early girlhood, when she wove such a bright
romance around Sara and Charles, and created for herself a beautiful
ideal for future worship, Olive had ceased to dream about love at all.
Feeling that its happiness was for ever denied her, she had altogether
relinquished those fancies in which young maidens indulge. In their
place had come the intense devotion to her Art, which, together with her
passionate, love for her mother, had absorbed all the interests of her
secluded life. Scarcely was she even conscious of the happiness that she
lost; for she had read few of those books which foster sentiment; and in
the wooings and weddings she heard of were none that aroused either her
sympathy or her envy. Coldly and purely she had moved in her sphere,
superior to both love's joy and love's pain.

Reaching home, Olive sought not to enter the house, where she knew there
could be no solitude. She went into the little arbour--her mother's
favourite spot--and there, hidden in the shadows of the mild autumn
night, she sat down, to gather up her strength, and calmly to think over
her mournful lot.

She said to herself, "There has come upon me that which I have heard is,
soon or late, every woman's destiny. I cannot beguile myself any longer.
It is not friendship I feel: it is love. My whole life is threaded by
one thought--the thought of him. It comes between me and everything else
on earth--almost between me and Heaven. I never wake at morning but his
name rises to my heart--the first hope of the day; I never kneel down
at night but in my prayer, whether in thought or speech, that name is
mingled too. If I have sinned, God forgive me; He knows how lonely and
desolate I was--how, when that one best love was taken away, my heart
ached and yearned for some other human love. And this has come to fill
it. Alas for me!

"Let me think. Will it ever pass away? There are feelings which come and
go--light girlish fancies. But I am six-and-twenty years old. All this
while I have lived