that
she believed the exact opposite of the truth in each particular. To her
not only did black seem white, but white black. Her dead lover had given
her but half his heart. Her living lover was the soul of honor and true
devotion. It was her duty, though not her pleasure, to try and love him;
to marry him would be a good and self-denying action.

And what could she lose by it? Her own chance of happiness was gone.
All she could hope for hereafter was the gentle satisfaction that arises
from making others happy. She had but a choice of evils: never to marry
at all, or to marry Frederick Coventry.

Thus far she was conscious of her own feelings, and could, perhaps, have
put them into words; but here she drifted out of her depth.

Nature implants in women a genuine love of offspring that governs
them unconsciously. It governs the unconscious child; it governs the
half-conscious mother who comes home from the toyshop with a waxen child
for her girl, and a drum for her boy.

Men desire offspring---when they desire it at all--from vanity alone.
Women desire it from pure love of it.

This instinct had probably its share in withholding Grace from making
up her mind never to marry; and so operated negatively, though not
positively, in Coventry's favor.

And so, by degrees and in course of time, after saying "no" a dozen
times, she said "yes" once in a moment of utter lassitude, and afterward
she cried and wished to withdraw her consent, but they were two to one,
and had right on their side, she thought.

They got her to say she would marry him some day or other.

Coventry intercepted several letters, but he took care not to read them
with Grace's sad face in sight. He would not give conscience such a
power to torment him. The earlier letters gave him a cruel satisfaction.
They were written each from a different city in the United States, and
all tended to show that the writer had a year or two to travel yet,
before he could hope to return home in triumph and marry his Grace.

In all these letters she was requested to send her answers to New York
(and, now I think of it, there was a postscript to that effect in the
very letter I have given in extenso).

But at last came a letter that disturbed this delightful dream. It was
written from the western extremity of the States, but the writer was
in high spirits; he had sold his patents in two great cities, and had
established them in two more on a royalty; he had also me