r for some days after, and warmly and
cordially acknowledged that he had been in the wrong. He even tried to
show her that he was in earnest by assuming for a while an altered
attitude towards the ladies, and actually succeeded so far that she
appeared to have forgotten that anything had occurred between them, and
was just the same in her intercourse with him as before--quietly
friendly that is to say, as she had been of recent years.

It never came to any real reconciliation on her side. She had seen too
clearly that his nature was only that of a drifting cloud, glowing for
the moment just as it was played upon by popular applause; and he was
too profoundly selfish for any real earnest love to find a root in his
composition, much less to give promise of a common life-growth. With his
feeling and good-nature he would have treated any wife well, even if she
had not made herself so necessary to him as she was; her social talent,
she felt, was her great safety--it made him look up to her; and his vain
nature required that she should be something to be proud of: but she was
forced to acknowledge in her own heart with despair that she had been
blinded by her love for him, that his nature was absolutely deficient in
constancy and truth, and in every quality which she had once persuaded
herself to see in him. She knew the secret about this man, so brilliant
before the eyes of the world--that he was not a man. He lived and moved
before her now like a defaced ideal, to which she was tied--to the end
of her life. The bitterness of disappointment rankled in her mind, and
was all the more poignant that she had to keep it shut up within herself
and had no one to confide in. Her life had become a desert, and at the
very moment when her husband would be making a brilliant little speech
that called forth applause all round the table, she would seem to hear
nothing but a rattle of emptiness. She always protested to her parents,
when they could not understand why she looked so pale, that she was
perfectly happy; and they had no reason to think otherwise, for she
seemed to be well cared for in every respect. The only real interest
which she possessed now in life was her son Frederick; but she brought
him up with the utmost possible strictness, for she fancied she detected
his father's nature over again in him.

She had always retained her warm interest in Elizabeth, and the messages
which she had received from her from time to time had al