lly devoid of calculation
or worldly wisdom, if she had only been conscious of it. An absurdly
loving, simple, impolitic young person was this Theodora of ours; but I,
for one, must confess to feeling some weak sympathy for her very
ignorance.

Among the many of the girl's admirers whom Denis Oglethorpe envied
jealously, perhaps the one most jealously envied, was Victor Maurien. A
jealous man might have feared him with reason under any circumstances,
and Denis chafed at his good-fortune miserably. The man who had the
honorable right to success could not fail to torture him.

"It would be an excellent match for Theo," was Lady Throckmorton's
complacent comment on the subject of the _attache's_ visit, and the
comment was made to Denis himself. "M. Maurien is the very man to take
good care of her; and besides that, he is, of course, desirable. Girls
like Theo ought to marry young. Marriage is their _forte_; they are too
dependent to be left to themselves. Theo is not like Pamela or your
Priscilla Gower, for instance; queenly as Theo looks, she is the veriest
strengthless baby on earth. It is a source of wonder to me where she got
the regal air."

But, perhaps, Lady Throckmorton did not understand her lovely young
relative fully. She did not take into consideration a certain mental
ripening process which had gone on slowly but surely during the last few
months. The time came when Theodora North began to comprehend her
powers, and feel the change in herself sadly. Then it was that she
ceased to be frank with Denis Oglethorpe, and began to feel a not
fully-defined humiliation and remorse.

Coming in unexpectedly once, Denis found her sitting all alone, with
open book in her lap, and eyes brooding over the fire. He knew the
volume well enough at sight; it was the half-forgotten, long-condemned
collection of his youthful poems; and when she saw him, she shut it up,
and laid her folded hands upon it, as if she did not wish him to
recognize it.

He was in one of his most unhappy moods, for some reason or other, and
so unreasonable was his frame of mind, that the movement, simple as it
was, galled him bitterly.

"Will you tell me why you did that?" he asked, abruptly.

Her eyes fell upon the carpet at her feet, but she sat with her hands
still clasped upon the half-concealed book, without answering him.

"You would not have done it three months ago," he said, almost
wrathfully, "and the thing is not more worthless now th