bruised, while attempting to save Margaret from destruction. That he had
really saved her was a less point in his favour than that he had barked
his shins in so doing. The proverbial relationship between pity and love
is so exceedingly well known that many professional love-makers
systematically begin their campaigns by endeavouring to move the
compassion of the woman they are attacking. Occasionally they find a
woman with whom pity is akin to scorn instead of to love--and then their
policy is a failure.

The dark Countess was no soft-hearted Saxon maiden, any more than she
was a cold-blooded, cut-throat American girl, calculating her romance by
the yard, booking her flirtations by double-entry and marrying at
compound interest, with the head of a railway president and the heart of
an Esquimaux. She was rather one of those women who are ever ready to
sympathise from a naturally generous and noble nature, but who rarely
give their friendship and still more seldom their love. They marry,
sometimes, where there is neither. They marry--ye gods! why do people
marry, and what reasons will they not find for marrying? But such
women, if they are wedded where their heart is not, are generally very
young; far too young to know what they are doing; and though there be
little inclination to the step, it always turns out that they had at
least a respect for the man. Margaret had been married to Count Alexis
because it was in every way such a plausible match, and she was only
eighteen then, poor thing. But Alexis was such an uncommonly good fellow
that she had honestly tried to love him, and had not altogether failed.
At least she had never had any domestic troubles, and when he was shot
at Plevna, in 1876, she shed some very genuine tears and shut herself
away from the world for a long time. But though her sorrow was sincere,
it was not profound, and she knew it from the first, never deceiving
herself with the idea that she could not marry again. She had sustained
many a siege, however, both before her husband's untimely death and
since; and though a stranger to love, she was no novice in love-making.
Indeed few women are; certainly no beautiful women.

Margaret, then, though a pure-hearted and brave lady, was of the world,
understanding the wiles thereof; and so, when Mr. Barker began to come
regularly to see her, and when she noticed how very long the slight
lameness he had incurred from the runaway accident seemed to last, and