the original moss and cotton-wool, and then looked about for the sheet
of tissue-paper that should complete the covering. He had destroyed
it, and had to search for a substitute. In so doing his eye fell upon
a long envelope on his dressing-table and he smiled. It contained his
marriage licence, and he bethought him that it was a very fair
substitute for tissue-paper, and quite as worthless. He extracted it,
and, placing it over the flowers, closed up the box. Then he carefully
directed it to "Mrs. George Caresfoot, Abbey House," and, ringing the
bell, desired the boots to find a messenger to take it over.

When he had done all this, he sat down and wondered what could have
come to him that he could take pleasure in doing a cruel action only
worthy of a jealous woman.

Perhaps of all the bitter cups which are held to our lips in this sad
world there is none more bitter than that which it was his lot to
drink of now. To begin with, the blow fell in youth, when we love or
hate, or act, with an ardour and an entire devotion that we give to
nothing in after-life. It is then that the heart puts forth its most
tender and yet its most lusty shoots, and if they are crushed the
whole plant suffers, and sometimes bleeds to death. Arthur had, to an
extent quite unrealized by himself until he lost her, centred all his
life in this woman, and it was no exaggeration to say, as he had said
to her, that she had murdered his heart, and withered up all that was
best in it. She had done more, she had inflicted the most cruel injury
upon him that a woman can inflict upon a man. She had shaken his
belief in her sex at large.

He felt, sitting there in his desolation, that now he had lost Angela
he could never be the same man he would otherwise have been. Her cruel
desertion had shattered the tinted glass through which youth looks at
the world, and he now, before his day, saw it as it is, grim and hard,
and full of coarse realities, and did not yet know that time would
again soften down the sharpest of the rough outlines, and throw a
garment of its own over the nakedness of life. He was a generous-
hearted man and not a vain one, and had he thought that Angela had
ceased to care for him and loved this other man, he could have found
it in his heart to forgive her, and even to sympathize with her; but
he could not think this. Something told him that it was not so. She
had contracted herself into a shameful, loveless marriage, and, to
gain