e other pangs quite noiseless: there are
other martyrs who suffer without the sign, who cannot even confess the
reason for the high faith that upholds them.

It was quite natural that she should desire to see Sylvie married. She
could never get over her distaste of having women taking bold strides
for the world's fame and favor. If left alone, this was what Sylvie
would surely do. The delicate womanly charities and kindnesses that had
filled up so much of her life would not satisfy her niece. And, now that
she had brought herself to the point of satisfaction with Jack Darcy,
either she had mistaken their regard, or he was proving himself an
indifferent lover. By a subtile intuition, she understood that Fred
still cared for her, nay, that he held now a reverent admiration that he
had never thought of in the past. His melancholy eyes followed her
about, now and then scintillating sparks of passion that seemed almost
to rend his soul. She experienced an intense and exquisite sympathy for
him that drew them together in a manner that he felt, and was grateful
for, but did not clearly understand.

As for Sylvie, curiously enough, she was at war with herself, though she
wore such a calm, light-hearted exterior. When she rejected Fred
Lawrence, she was quite sure she despised the present man, and his
narrow, futile purposes of life. Truly, to have been the wife of such a
man would have proved irksome to the last degree. But his misfortunes
had brought out the fine gold, the solemn strain of strength and
endurance, that had come from his father's blood. I think even Sylvie
had been a little mortified first, that he should have come back to
Yerbury, and taken such a very inferior position. She wanted him to do
something noteworthy with his pen and his high cultivation. It seemed so
much choice material quite thrown away. Designing patterns was surely no
high test of genius. Women with a purely technical art education had
done it.

But out of it had come this other opportunity that he had grasped with
the pure instinct of genius. Employment for pen and pencil both, for the
embodiment of the exquisite outward forms of beauty, and the rare,
delicate, inward graces of imagination, for the true standards of taste
and art in which he had been informing himself all these years; in the
spirit of dilettanteism, it was true, but now when the intellectual
impetus was added, and the positive need of daily bread, these
complicated motives