the carrying on of her emotion of the
moment of sharp sour sweet--such as it may be, the doomed below attain
for their knowledge of joy--when, at the first meeting with her lover,
the perception of his treachery to the soul confiding in him, told her
she had lived, and opened out the cherishable kingdom of insensibility
to her for her heritage.

She made her tragic humility speak thankfully to the wound that slew
her. 'Had it not been so, I should not have seen him,' she said:--Her
lover would not have come to her but for his pursuit of another woman.

She pardoned him for being attracted by that beautiful transplant of the
fields: pardoned her likewise. 'He when I saw him first was as beautiful
to me. For him I might have done as much.'

Far away in a lighted hall of the West, her family raised hands of
reproach. They were minute objects, keenly discerned as diminished
figures cut in steel. Feeling could not be very warm for them, they were
so small, and a sea that had drowned her ran between; and looking
that way she had scarce any warmth of feeling save for a white rhaiadr
leaping out of broken cloud through branched rocks, where she had
climbed and dreamed when a child. The dream was then of the coloured
days to come; now she was more infant in her mind, and she watched the
scattered water broaden, and tasted the spray, sat there drinking the
scene, untroubled by hopes as a lamb, different only from an infant in
knowing that she had thrown off life to travel back to her home and be
refreshed. She heard her people talk; they were unending babblers in the
waterfall. Truth was with them, and wisdom. How, then, could she pretend
to any right to live? Already she had no name; she was less living than
a tombstone. For who was Chloe? Her family might pass the grave of Chloe
without weeping, without moralizing. They had foreseen her ruin, they
had foretold it, they noised it in the waters, and on they sped to the
plains, telling the world of their prophecy, and making what was untold
as yet a lighter thing to do.

The lamps in an irregularly dotted line underneath the hill beckoned her
to her task of appearing as the gayest of them that draw their breath
for the day and have pulses for the morrow.

CHAPTER X

At midnight the great supper party to celebrate the reconciliation of
Mr. Beamish and Duchess Susan broke up, and beneath a soft fair sky the
ladies, with their silvery chatter of gratitude for amusement, c