marrying his cousin.

That he could hold her accountable for any other wrong to him she did
not admit. At times the memory of his fresh and buoyant youth, in so
great contrast to the jaded maturity of his cousin, knocked at the
door of her heart, and the ardent expressions of his worshipping,
passionate love for her echoed there with a distinctness that amazed
her.

Surely he had loved her--this she could not doubt. But if his love
had been so slight that a few months of absence had cooled it, and of
so poor a quality that a new caprice had taken its place so soon, she
was well rid of it. That this had been so the letter which Lord
Hurdly had shown her sufficiently attested, and she must guard
herself against the folly of sentimental regrets.

It was not Horace that she regretted. It was only the ideal of the
love between man and woman which her brief intercourse with him had
held up to her. She had seen love in a different guise since
then--or what went by the name of love--and surely the contrast must
have had a deeper root than the mere difference between youth and
middle-age.

It was not often that Bettina allowed herself to think of these
things. But now, in her solitude and idleness, visions would come of
the eager lover, strong as a young Narcissus, who represented love in
such a simple, wholesome guise--or at least so it had seemed to be.
Then she would shake off the image, and tell herself it was but
seeming, as the result had proved, and so she would accuse herself of
weakness and sentimentality. These thoughts were getting to be
inconvenient. They haunted her too persistently, and at last she
began to wish for the time to come when her days would again be too
crowded with engagements for her to indulge in such foolish
reflections.

The truth was, deep down in Bettina's heart there was a fear which
she could not wholly still in any waking hour. She could and did
refuse to recognize it, even in her own soul; but there it was, and
there it remained, to rise again and again, and almost stifle her
with the sinister possibility which it suggested.

This fear was based upon the clearer knowledge of Lord Hurdly's
character which had come to her since marriage. She had found in him
an inexorable resolution to have what he wanted in life, which had
rendered him, more than once within her knowledge, unscrupulous as to
the means he used in the securing of his ends. This it was which had
planted in her mind the a