was no sacrifice he would not have made to
bring her nearer to him. In his upright, quiet, simple kind of way, he
immolated himself before her. For months his heart had ached with this
hopeless passion. He recognized that it was hopeless. He knew that she
would never love him, and, to do her justice, she never had given him
reason to suppose that it was in her power to love him, r any man. And
here he stood, obliged to appear ungrateful and prejudiced, mean and
vindictive, in her eyes. He took his seat again, looking so unutterably
dejected, his patient face so tragically mournful, that Madeleine, after
a while, began to see the absurd side of the matter, and presently burst
into a laugh "Please do not look so frightfully miserable!" said she;
"I did not mean to make you unhappy. After all, what does it matter? You
have a perfect right to refuse, and, for my part, I have not the least
wish to see you accept."

On this, Carrington brightened, and declared that if she thought him
right in declining, he cared for nothing else. It was only the idea of
hurting her feelings that weighed on his mind. But in saying this, he
spoke in a tone that implied a deeper feeling, and made Mrs. Lee again
look grave and sigh.

"Ah, Mr. Carrington," she said, "this world will not run as we want.
Do you suppose the time will ever come when every one will be good and
happy and do just what they ought? I thought this offer might possibly
take one anxiety off your shoulders. I am sorry now that I let myself be
led into making it."

Carrington could not answer her. He dared not trust his voice. He rose
to go, and as she held out her hand, he suddenly raised it to his lips,
and so left her. She sat for a moment with tears in her eyes after he
was gone. She thought she knew all that was in his mind, and with
a woman's readiness to explain every act of men by their consuming
passions for her own sex, she took it as a matter of course that
jealousy was the whole cause of Carrington's hostility to Ratcliffe,
and she pardoned it with charming alacrity. "Ten years ago, I could have
loved him," she thought to herself, and then, while she was half smiling
at the idea, suddenly another thought flashed upon her, and she threw
her hand up before her face as though some one had struck her a blow.
Carrington had reopened the old wound.

When Ratcliffe came to see her again, which he did very shortly
afterwards, glad of so good an excuse, she told him of C