the smooth, whitened trunk of a beech
tree. Her hands locked themselves tightly together; her face, white and
miserable, lifted itself despairingly towards the pitiless winter sky
above her.

"How am I to live out my life?" she asked herself, in her anguish.

It had not entered into her head that she could alter it. It did not
occur to her to imagine that she could give up anything to which she now
stood pledged. To be John Kynaston's wife, and to love his brother, that
was what struck upon her with horror; no other possible contingency had
as yet suggested itself to her.

Presently, as she moved slowly onwards, still absorbed in her new-found
misfortune, a fresh train of thought came into her mind. She thought no
longer about herself, but about him.

"How cruel I was to leave him like that," she said to herself,
reproachfully; "without a word, or so much as a look, of
consolation--for, if I suffer, has not he suffered too!"

She forgot that he had asked her for nothing; she only knew that, little
enough as she had to give him, she had withheld that little from him.

"What must he think of me?" she repeated to herself, in dismay. "How
heartless and how cold I must be in his eyes to have parted from him thus
without one single kind word. I might, at least, have told him that I was
grateful for the love I cannot take. I wonder," she continued, half aloud
to herself, "I wonder what it is like to be loved by Maurice----" She
paused again, this time leaning against the wicket-gate that led out of
the park into the high road.

A little smile played for one instant about her lips, a soft, far-away
look lingered in her dreaming eyes for just a moment--just the space of
time it might take you to count twenty; she let her fancy carry her
away--_where_?

Ah, sweet and perilous reverie! too dear and too dangerous to be safely
indulged in. Vera roused herself with a start, passing her hand across
her brow as though to brush away the thoughts that would fain have
lingered there.

"Impossible!" she said aloud to herself, moving on again rapidly. "I must
be a fool to stand here dreaming--I, whose fate is irrevocably fixed; and
I would sooner die than alter it. The best match in the county, it is
called. Well, so it is; and nothing less would satisfy me. But--but--I
think I will see him once again, and wish him good-bye more kindly."

CHAPTER XVI.

"POOR WISDOM."

No; vain, alas! the endeavour
From bonds so