he?" he asked tenderly, when he had waited
a moment.

He waited still another. Then the reply came.

"I suppose it was better I should know it," she said in a cold, hard
voice.

"So thou seest, dear child, he meant not his fair words."

"No," she said, in the same tone. "He meant it not."

Sir Thomas let her go. He thought she bore it uncommonly well. She did
not care much about it, thank Heaven! He was one of those numerous
surface observers who think that a woman cannot be startled if she does
not scream, nor be unhappy if she does not weep.

Blanche went quietly enough out of the room, saying that she would send
Clare. Her father did not see that in the middle of the stairs she
paused, with a tight grasp on the banister, till the deadly faintness
should pass off which seemed to make the staircase go spinning round
her. Clare noticed nothing peculiar when Blanche came into their
bedroom, and told her that Sir Thomas was below. But as soon as her
sister was gone, Blanche knelt down by the bed, and buried her face in
the counterpane.

This, then, was the end. The shrine was not only deserted--it was
destroyed: the idol was not only dethroned--it was broken, and shown to
be nothing but stone. Don Juan was not true. Nay, worse--he never had
been true. His vow of eternal fidelity was empty breath; his reiterated
protestations of single and unalterable love were worth just nothing.
He had only been amusing himself. He had known all the while, that in
exchange for the solid gold of her young heart, he was offering her the
veriest pinchbeck.

Blanche had been half awake before, and she was wide awake now. Yet the
awakening, for all that, was very bitter. Naturally enough, her first
thought was that all men were of this stamp, and that there was no truth
in any of them. Aunt Rachel was right:--they were a miserable, false,
deceiving race, created for the delusion and suffering of woman: she
would never believe another of them as long as she lived. There might
be here and there an exception to the rule, such as her father or Mr
Tremayne; she could not believe such evil of them: but that was the
rule. And Blanche, being not quite seventeen, declared to herself that
after this vast and varied experience of the world, she would never--not
if she lived to be a hundred--_never_ trust man again.

She slipped quietly down-stairs, and caught Sir Thomas just as he was
leaving the house.

"Father!" she whis