-house
among a gay party in which royalty smiled, and the subject was content
beneath the smile. But there was one rebellious subject, and her name
was Hester Orval. She was a wilful girl who had lived life selfishly
within the lines of that decorous yet pleasant convention to which she
was born. She was beautiful,--she knew that, and royalty had graciously
admitted it. She was warm-thoughted, and possessed the fatal strain of
the artistic temperament. She was not sure that she had a heart; and
many others, not of her sex, after varying and enthusiastic study of the
matter, were not more confident than she. But it had come at last that
she had listened with pensive pleasure to Trafford's tale of love;
and because to be worshipped by a man high in all men's, and in most
women's, esteem, ministered delicately to her sweet egotism, and because
she was proud of him, she gave him her hand in promise, and her cheek
in privilege, but denied him--though he knew this not--her heart and
the service of her life. But he was content to wait patiently for that
service, and he wholly trusted her, for there was in him some fine
spirit of the antique world.

There had come to Falkenstowe, this country-house and her father's home,
a man who bore a knightly name, but who had no knightly heart; and he
told Ulysses' tales, and covered a hazardous and cloudy past with that
fascinating colour which makes evil appear to be good, so that he roused
in her the pulse of art, which she believed was soul and life, and her
allegiance swerved. And when her mother pleaded with her, and when her
father said stern things, and even royalty, with uncommon use,
rebuked her gently, her heart grew hard; and almost on the eve of her
wedding-day she fled with her lover, and married him, and together they
sailed away over the seas.

The world was shocked and clamorous for a matter of nine days, and then
it forgot this foolish and awkward circumstance; but Just Trafford never
forgot it. He remembered all vividly until the hour, a year later, when
London journals announced that Hester Orval and her husband had gone
down with a vessel wrecked upon the Alaskan and Canadian coast. And
there new regret began, and his knowledge of her ended.

But she and her husband had not been drowned; with a sailor they had
reached the shore in safety. They had travelled inland from the coast
through the great mountains by unknown paths, and as they travelled, the
sailor died; an