known to do.
Happiness, too, is a crowning charm to any woman, and Lilian was
deeply and contentedly happy: a smile perpetually played in the
little, half-guessed dimples at the corners of her mouth, and her wide
clear eyes were full of peace. No; though years should rob Lilian of
bloom, it was plain that they could but add fresh charms to her soul;
and Lilian's lover must needs love her soul.

She was to be married in a couple of years--her mother would not hear
of it at present--to one who had been her lover from her cradle, and
who loved her with a tender and devoted passion, who thought her
embodied loveliness, and who would have made any sacrifice, even to
death, for her welfare. She had seemed to him from the hour when he
first saw her--a blue-eyed, rosy child with an aureole of palest
yellow hair--a being not made of clay--something remote and different
as the angels are; and when he first discovered that he loved her he
had felt momentarily as if he committed a sacrilege, and though he
lost that sensation soon enough, she always, seemed to him a holy and
perfect thing. The only cloud that crossed her sky now was sometimes
when this passion of Sterling's oppressed her or constrained her, and
made her feel that her love was less than his.

Sterling was in the first flush of manhood, some half dozen years her
senior--a hazel-eyed, bright-haired Saxon, and a noble, upright
fellow: he was as prosperous in his fortunes as he had a right to
expect, for his father had established him in a good business, and
with suitable thrift and care there was no reason why he should not
succeed. His father was a man of such strict adherence to theory that
he allowed the boy, as he still called him, only the same chance that
he himself had had: he lent him his capital and exacted a rigid
payment of the interest. "John shall share my fortune equally with
Helen and his mother," Mr. Sterling used to say, "when he has shown me
that he deserves it and can double it." And John, sure that any theory
of his father's was as right as a law of the universe, was only
anxious to keep the warm affection that he knew lay behind the stern
principle.

He lived with Lilian's mother, whom he had persuaded, when she found
it necessary to make exertion, to come to the city and rent a house
there for himself and two or three of his friends. He meant to take
the house off her hands as soon as he was able to afford so large an
expenditure, and meantime