e;
having the fullest capacity for all the elementary passions--hatred,
love, cruelty, delight, loyalty, revolt, jealousy. She had never from
her birth until now felt love for any one. She had never been awakened.
Even her affection for her father had been dutiful rather than
instinctive. She had provoked love, but had never given it. She had been
self-centred, compulsive, unrelenting. She had unmoved seen and let her
husband go to his doom--it was his doom and death so far as she knew.

Yet, as I thought of this, I found myself again admiring her. She was
handsome, independent, distinctly original, and possessing capacity
for great things. Besides, so far, she had not been actively
vindictive--simply passively indifferent to the sufferings of others.
She seemed to regard results more than means. All she did not like she
could empty into the mill of the destroying gods: just as General Grant
poured hundreds of thousands of men into the valley of the James, not
thinking of lives but victory, not of blood but triumph. She too, even
in her cruelty, seemed to have a sense of wild justice which disregarded
any incidental suffering.

I could see that Mr. Devlin was attracted by her, as every man had
been who had ever met her; for, after all, man is but a common slave
to beauty: virtue he respects, but beauty is man's valley of suicide.
Presently she turned to Mr. Devlin, having, as it seemed to me,
made Roscoe and Ruth sufficiently uncomfortable. With that cheerful
insouciance which was always possible to her on the most trying
occasions, she immediately said, as she had often said to me, that she
had come to Mr. Devlin to be amused for the morning, perhaps the whole
day. It was her way, her selfish way, to make men her slaves.

Mr. Devlin gallantly said that he was at her disposal, and with a kind
of pride added that there was plenty in the valley which would interest
her; for he was a frank, bluff man, who would as quickly have spoken
disparagingly of what belonged to himself, if it was not worthy, as have
praised it.

"Where shall we go first?" he said. "To the mill?"

"To the mill, by all means," Mrs. Falchion replied; "I have never been
in a great saw-mill, and I believe this is very fine. Then," she added,
with a little wave of the hand towards the cable running down from Phil
Boldrick's eyrie in the mountains, "then I want to see all that cable
can do--all, remember."

Mr. Devlin laughed. "Well, it hasn't many t