and loyalty, and honour
worth, if they could not keep him true to the girl whose love
he had won five years ago, and to whom he was a thousand times
pledged by every loving promise, every word of affection that
had once passed between them? And yet, was this Maria to whom
he had come back, this Maria so cold and indifferent, so alien
from him in tastes, ideas, sympathies, was she indeed the very
woman who had once won his heart, whom he had chosen as his
life-long companion? How had it all been? He looked back into
the past, to the first days after his return from the Crimea,
when, wounded and helpless, worn out with toil and fever, he
had come back to be tended by Englishwomen in an English home.
A vision rose before him of a blooming girl with blue ribbons
that matched blue eyes, who came and went about him softly
through the long spring and summer days, arranging his
cushions, fetching his books, and reading to him by the hour
in gentle, unvarying tones. Yes, he understood well enough how
it had all come to pass; but those days had gone by, and the
Maria who had brightened them, was not she gone also? or
rather, had she ever existed except in the eyes that had
invested the kind girl-nurse with every perfection? And now
what remained? Graham groaned as he bowed his head upon his
crossed arms, and suddenly another vision flitted before him--a
pale face, a slender form, a pair of brown eyes that seemed to
grow out of the twilight, and look at him with a child's
affection, a woman's passion--Graham was no boy, to be tossed
about on the tempestuous waves of a first love; he had long
held that there were things in life, to which love and
courtship, marrying and giving in marriage, might be looked
upon as quite subordinate--and yet he felt, at that moment, as
if life itself would be a cheap exchange for one touch of the
small hand that had clung so confidingly to his, years ago,
for one more look into the eyes that had met his, scarcely ten
minutes since.

Such a mood could not long endure in a man of Graham's stamp
and habit of mind; and in a moment he had roused himself, and
begun to walk slowly back towards the house. What he might
feel could have no practical bearing on the matter one way or
another, and feeling might therefore as well be put out of
sight. He was bound to Maria by every tie of honour, and he
was no man to break those ties--if she were disposed to hold by
them. But was she indeed? Graham had not bee