r, had leisure to recover herself after the many severe strokes
that had been made at her. There was one which she had rebutted
valiantly at the moment, but which proved to have been a poisoned
dart--that suggestion that it might be selfish in her not to set Louis
even more free, by her own marriage!

She revolved the probabilities: Clara, formed, guided, supported by
himself, the companion of his earlier youth, preferred to all others,
and by this time, no doubt, developed into all that was admirable. What
would be more probable than their mutual love? And when Mary went over
all the circumstances of her own strange courtship, she could not but
recur to her mother's original impression, that Louis had not known
what he was doing. Those last weeks had made her feel rather than
believe otherwise, but they were far in the distance now, and he had
been so young! It was not unlikely that even yet, while believing
himself faithful to her, his heart was in Clara's keeping, and that the
news of her marriage would reveal to them both, in one rush of
happiness, that they were destined for each other from the first.

Mary felt intense pain, and yet a strange thrill of joy, to think that
Louis might at last be happy.

She drew Clara's last letter out of her basket, and re-read it, in
hopes of some contradiction. Clara's letters had all hitherto been
stiff. She had not been acknowledged to be in the secret of Mary's
engagement while it subsisted, and this occasioned a delicacy in
writing to her on any subject connected with it; and so the mention of
the meeting at the 'Grand Monarque' came in tamely, and went off
quickly into Lord Ormersfield's rheumatism and Charlemagne's tomb. But
the remarkable thing in the letter was the unusual perfume of happiness
that pervaded it; the conventional itinerary was abandoned, and there
was a tendency to droll sayings--nay, some shafts from a quiver at
which Mary could guess. She had set all down as the exhilaration of
Louis's presence, but perhaps that exhilaration, was to a degree in
which she alone could sympathize.

Mary was no day-dreamer; and yet, ere Rosita's satin shoe was on the
threshold, she had indulged in the melancholy fabric of a castle at
Ormersfield, in which she had no share, except the consciousness that
it had been her self-sacrifice that had given Louis at last the
felicity for which he was so well fitted.

But at night, in her strange little room, lying in her ha