re clear to them. Rhoda called up the
pride of her womanhood that she might despise the man who had dared to
distrust her. She kept her poppy colour throughout the day, so sensitive
was this pride. But most she was angered, after reflection, by the
doubts which Robert appeared to cast on Dahlia, in setting his finger
upon that burning line of Scripture. It opened a whole black kingdom to
her imagination, and first touched her visionary life with shade. She
was sincere in her ignorance that the doubts were her own, but they lay
deep in unawakened recesses of the soul; it was by a natural action of
her reason that she transferred and forced them upon him who had chanced
to make them visible.

CHAPTER V

When young minds are set upon a distant object, they scarcely live
for anything about them. The drive to the station and the parting
with Robert, the journey to London, which had latterly seemed to her
secretly-distressed anticipation like a sunken city--a place of wonder
with the waters over it--all passed by smoothly; and then it became
necessary to call a cabman, for whom, as he did her the service to lift
her box, Rhoda felt a gracious respect, until a quarrel ensued between
him and her uncle concerning sixpence;--a poor sum, as she thought; but
representing, as Anthony impressed upon her understanding during the
conflict of hard words, a principle. Those who can persuade themselves
that they are fighting for a principle, fight strenuously, and maybe
reckoned upon to overmatch combatants on behalf of a miserable small
coin; so the cabman went away discomfited. He used such bad language
that Rhoda had no pity for him, and hearing her uncle style it "the
London tongue," she thought dispiritedly of Dahlia's having had to
listen to it through so long a season. Dahlia was not at home; but Mrs.
Wicklow, Anthony's landlady, undertook to make Rhoda comfortable, which
operation she began by praising dark young ladies over fair ones, at
the same time shaking Rhoda's arm that she might not fail to see a
compliment was intended. "This is our London way," she said. But Rhoda
was most disconcerted when she heard Mrs. Wicklow relate that her
daughter and Dahlia were out together, and say, that she had no doubt
they had found some pleasant and attentive gentleman for a companion, if
they had not gone purposely to meet one. Her thoughts of her sister were
perplexed, and London seemed a gigantic net around them both.

"Yes, tha