ate, or gone stale and been thrown away.

Godfrey was not one of these, because the hand of Circumstance had
managed his affairs otherwise. Isobel was no mess of potage, but with
all her faults and failings, a fair and great inheritance for him who
could take seisin of her. Still, as he believed, she had first treated
him badly, then utterly neglected him whose pride she had outraged, by
not even taking the trouble to write him a letter, and finally, had
vanished away. And he was young, with manhood advancing in his veins,
like the pulse of spring, and women are many in the world, some of whom
have pretty faces and proper figures. Also, although the fact is
overlooked by convention, it has pleased Nature to make man polygamous
in his instincts, though where those instincts end and what is called
love begins, is a thing almost impossible to define. Probably in truth
the limit lies beyond the borders of sex.

So Isobel's grey eyes faded into the background of Godfrey's mental
vision, while the violet eyes of Juliette drew ever nearer to his
physical perceptions. And here, to save trouble, it may be said at
once, that he never cared in the least for Juliette, except as a male
creature cares for a pretty female creature, and that Juliette never
cared in the least for him, except as a young woman cares in general
for a handsome and attractive young man--with prospects. Indeed, she
found him too serious for her taste. She did not understand him, as,
for his part, in her he found nothing to understand.

After all, ruling out the primary impulses which would make a scullery
maid congenial to a genius upon a desert isle, what was there in a
Juliette to appeal to a Godfrey? And, with the same qualification, what
was there in a Godfrey to appeal to a Juliette? As once, with an
accidental touch of poetry, she said to her mother, when at his side
she felt as though she were walking over a snow-covered crevasse in the
surrounding Alps. All seemed firm beneath her feet, but she never knew
when the crust would break, and he would vanish into unfathomed depths,
perchance dragging her with him. Or, feeling her danger she might run
from him on to safer ground, where she knew herself to be on good,
common rock or soil, and no strange, hollow echoes struck her ears,
leaving him to pursue his perilous journey alone.

Her mother laughed, and falling into her humour, answered, that beyond
the crevasse and at the foot of the further slope la