hose heroism lay more in rhetorical
visions addressed to his partner in the intervals of dancing than in
hard blows given and taken in the field.

CHAPTER SIX.

DESTROYED BY THE HURRICANE.

"Our plans may be disjointed,
But we may calmly rest:
What God has once appointed
Is better than our best."--Frances Ridley Havergal.

The Countess left Clarice prostrate on the ground, sobbing as if her
heart would break--Olympias feebly trying to raise and soothe her,
Roisia looking half-stunned, and Felicia palpably amused by the scene.

"Thou hadst better get up, child," said Diana, in a tone divided between
constraint and pity. "It will do thee no good to lie there. We shall
all have to put up with the same thing in our turn. I haven't got the
man I should have chosen; but I suppose it won't matter a hundred years
hence."

"I am not so sure of that," said Roisia, in a low voice.

"Oh, thou art disappointed, I know," said Diana. "I would hand Fulk
over to thee with pleasure, if I could. I don't want him. But I
suppose he will do as well as another, and I shall take care to be
mistress. It is something to be married--to anybody."

"It is everything to be married to the right man," said Roisia; "but it
is something very awful to be married to the wrong one."

"Oh, one soon gets over that," was Diana's answer. "So long as you can
have your own way, I don't see that anything signifies much. I shall
not admire myself in my wedding-dress any the less because my squire is
not exactly the one I hoped it might be."

"Diana, I don't understand thee," responded Roisia. "What does it
matter, I should say, having thine own way in little nothings so long as
thou art not to have it in the one thing for which thou really carest?
Thou dost not mean to say that a velvet gown would console thee for
breaking thy heart?"

"But I do," said Diana. "I must be a countess before I could wear
velvet; and I would marry any man in the world who would make me a
countess."

Mistress Underdone, who had lifted up Clarice, and was holding her in
her arms, petting her into calmness as she would a baby, now thought fit
to interpose.

"My maids," she said, "there are women who have lost their hearts, and
there are women who were born without any. The former case has the more
suffering, yet methinks the latter is really the more pitiable."

"Well, I think those people pitiable enough who let their hearts break
their sleep a