seriously depressed her.

Dismissing the housekeeper, she put on a shade-hat and went for a
ramble in the park. How beautiful it was! What shrubs, what trees,
what undulations of rich emerald turf! She could not in the least
feel that she had any right in it all. But how must a creature love
it who had looked upon its noble beauties from childhood up to
youth, and on to manhood, with the belief that it would some day be
his own! She could not stifle the feeling that she had wronged that
being if by her marriage she should be the means of depriving him of
such a fortune and position, and deep, deep down in her consciousness
she had a boding fear that, if all things hidden could be revealed,
it might be shown that in a keener sense than this she had also
wronged him.

For marriage had been in many ways an illumination to Bettina. The
revelation of her own heart which it had given her was one which she
tried hard to shut her eyes to. Twice she had consented to the idea
of marrying without love. Once she had actually done this thing. Only
her own heart knew what had been the consequences to her. But of one
thing she had often felt glad. This was that she had not entered into
a loveless marriage with a man who had loved her as she had believed
Horace did at the time he had so ardently wooed her. From such a
wrong as that might she be delivered!

As her thoughts now dwelt on Horace and the circumstances of their
brief past together, the memory of his honest, tender, self-forgetful
attitude toward her recurred to her half wistfully, in contrast to
her recent experiences. Lord Hurdly's manner toward her had, in
truth, changed from the very hour of their marriage. He no longer had
the air of a solicitous suitor, but took at once that of the assured
husband and master. It made her think what she had heard of his
father and of his poor little mother's history. Not that she could
fancy herself becoming, under any circumstances, a Griselda; though
she could without difficulty imagine him in his father's _role_.

But what right had she, she asked herself, to expect to reap where
she had not sown? She had married for money and position, and she had
got them. What more had she expected?

Nothing more, perhaps; but in one point she had been
disappointed--namely, in the power of these things to give her what
she longed for, and what she could define only under the indefinite
term happiness.

CHAPTER V

Bettina's talk w