rew her arms around her, in a pose of which she felt the perfection,
and kissed her tenderly.

"Why didn't you let me see how you were looking? How I have gone
on----"

Cornelia pulled herself loose. "Charmian! Do you _dare_ to mean that I
want him to ever speak to me again--or look at me?"

"No, no----"

"Or that I'm sorry I did it?"

"No; it's this cold that's making me so stupid."

"If he were to come back again this instant, I should have to tell him
just the same, or else tell him about that--that--and you know I
couldn't do that if I lived a thousand years."

Now she melted, indeed, and suffered Charmian to moan over her, and
fortify her with all the reasons she had urged herself in various forms
of repetition. Charmain showed her again how impossible everything that
she had thought impossible was, and convinced her of every conviction.
She made Cornelia's tragedy her romance, and solemnly exulted in its
fatality, while she lifted her in her struggle of conscience to a
height from which for the present at least, Cornelia could not have
descended without a ruinous loss of self-respect. In the renunciation
in which the worshipper confirmed her saint, Ludlow and his rights and
feelings were ignored, and Cornelia herself was offered nothing more
substantial than the prospect that henceforth she and Charmian could
live for each other in a union that should be all principle on one side
and all adoration on the other.

XXXIII.

Cornelia did not go to pass that week in Lent with Mrs. Westley. When
she went, rather tardily, to withdraw her promise, she said that the
time was now growing so short she must give every moment to the
Synthesis. Mrs. Westley tacitly arranged to cancel some little plans
she had made for her, and in the pity a certain harassed air of the
girl's moved in her, she accepted her excuses as valid, and said, "But
I am afraid you are overworking at the Synthesis, Miss Saunders. Are
you feeling quite well?"

"Oh, perfectly," Cornelia answered with a false buoyancy from which she
visibly fell. She looked down, and said, "I wish the work was twice as
hard!"

"Ah, you have come to that very soon," said Mrs. Westley; and then they
were both silent, till she added, "How are you getting on with your
picture of Miss Maybough?"

"Oh, I'm not doing anything with that," said Cornelia, and she stood up
to go.

"But you are going to exhibit it?" Mrs. Westley persisted.

"No, T don't know a