that in contrasting them
the girl groaned and grew sick at heart. She felt that she stood upon
a mine already charged, and that at any moment that wretched man who
held the fatal fuse in his brutal hand, might hurl her and all her
hopes into irremediable chaos and ruin. If the fastidious and
aristocratic people who had kindly applauded her singing a little
while ago could have imagined the dense cloud of social humiliation
that threatened to burst upon her, would she have even been tolerated
in that assemblage? Ignorance of her parentage was her sole passport
into really good society, and the prestige of her guardian's noble
name an ermine mantle of protection, which might be rudely torn away.

During the last three days, left to the companionship of her own sad
thoughts, and unable to see Olga alone for even a moment, more than
one painful and unutterably bitter discovery had been made. She felt
that indeed her childhood had flown for ever, that the sacred
mysterious chrism of womanhood had been poured upon her young heart.

Until forced to observe the marked admiration which in his own house
Mr. Palma evinced when conversing with Mrs. Carew, Regina had been
conscious only of a profound respect for him, of a deeply grateful
appreciation of his protecting care; and even when he interrogated
her with reference to her affection for Mr. Lindsay, she had
truthfully averred her conviction that her heart was wholly
disengaged.

But sternly honest in dealing with her own soul, subsequent events
had painfully shocked her into a realization of the feeling that
first manifested itself as she watched Mr. Palma and Mrs. Carew at
the dinner-table.

She knew now that the keen pang she suffered that day could mean
nothing less solemn and distressing than the mortifying fact that she
was beginning to love her guardian. Not merely as a grateful,
respectful ward, the august lawyer who represented her mother's
authority, but as a woman once, and once only in life, loves the man,
whom her pure tender heart humbly acknowledges as her king, her
high-priest, her one divinity in clay.

Although conscience acquitted her of any intentional weakness, her
womanly pride and delicacy bled at every pore, when she arraigned
herself for being guilty of this emotion toward one who regarded her
as a child, who merely pitied her forlorn isolation; and whose eye
would fill with fiery scorn, could he dream of her presumptuous, her
unfeminine folly.