d that they were sins of impurity, and her understanding of such
could scarcely have been expressed save in the general language of her
prayers. Guarded jealously at every moment of her life, the world had
made no blur on the fair tablet of her mind; her Eden had suffered
no invasion. She could only repeat to herself that her heart had gone
dreadfully astray in its fondness, and that, whatsoever it cost her, the
old hopes, the strength of which was only now proved, must be utterly
uprooted. And knowing that, she wept.

Sin was too surely sorrow, though it neared her only in imagination. In
a few weeks she seemed to have almost outgrown girlhood; her steps were
measured, her smile was seldom and lacked mirth. The revelation would
have done so much; the added and growing trouble of Mutimer's attentions
threatened to sink her in melancholy. She would not allow it to be seen
more than she could help; cheerful activity in the life of home was one
of her moral duties, and she strove hard to sustain it. It was a relief
to find herself alone each night, alone with her sickness of heart.

The repugnance aroused in her by the thought of becoming Mutimer's wife
was rather instinctive than reasoned. From one point of view, indeed,
she deemed it wrong, since it might be entirely the fruit of the love
she was forbidden to cherish. Striving to read her conscience, which for
years had been with her a daily task and was now become the anguish of
every hour, she found it hard to establish valid reasons for steadfastly
refusing a man who was her mother's choice. She read over the marriage
service frequently. There stood the promise--to love, to honour, and to
obey. Honour and obedience she might render him, but what of love? The
question arose, what did love mean? Could there be such a thing as
love of an unworthy object? Was she not led astray by the spirit of
perverseness which was her heritage?

Adela could not bring herself to believe that 'to love' in the sense of
the marriage service and to 'be in love' as her heart understood it
were one and the same thing. The Puritanism of her training led her to
distrust profoundly those impulses of mere nature. And the circumstances
of her own unhappy affection tended to confirm her in this way of
thinking. Letty Tew certainly thought otherwise, but was not Letty's own
heart too exclusively occupied by worldly considerations?

Yet it said 'love.' Perchance that was something which would come