he world is greater than mine, and will tell you
better than I can," she replied, calmly. "Three months since they would
have been a suitable present to one in the position I held then; now
they are quite out of place, and I decline them."

"You decline them!" exclaimed Lady Darrell, hardly believing that it was
in human nature to refuse such jewels.

Pauline smiled calmly, repeated the words, and walked away.

Sir Oswald, with an angry murmur, replaced the jewels in the case and
set it aside.

"She has the Darrell spirit," he said to his wife, with an awkward
smile; and she devoutly hoped that her husband would not often exhibit
the same.

CHAPTER XXV.

A TRUE DARRELL.

The way in which the girl supported her disappointment was lofty in the
extreme. She bore her defeat as proudly as some would have borne a
victory. No one could have told from her face or her manner that she had
suffered a grievous defeat. When she alluded to the change in her
position, it was with a certain proud humility that had in it nothing
approaching meanness or envy.

It did not seem that she felt the money-loss; it was not the
disappointment about mere wealth and luxury. It was rather an unbounded
distress that she had been set aside as unworthy to represent the race
of the Darrells--that she, a "real" Darrell, had been forced to make way
for what, in her own mind, she called a "baby-faced stranger"--that her
training and education, on which her dear father had prided himself,
should be cast in her face as unworthy and deserving of reproach. He and
his artist-friends had thought her perfection; that very "perfection" on
which they had prided themselves, and for which they had so praised and
flattered her, was the barrier that had stood between her and her
inheritance.

It was a painful position, but her manner of bearing it was exalted. She
had not been a favorite--the pride, the truth, the independence of her
nature had forbidden that. She had not sought the liking of strangers,
nor courted their esteem; she had not been sweet and womanly, weeping
with those who wept, and rejoicing with those who rejoiced; she had
looked around her with a scorn for conventionalities that had not sat
well upon one so young--and now she was to pay the penalties for all
this. She knew that people talked about her--that they said she was
rightly punished, justly treated--that it was a blessing for the whole
county to have a proper Lady Darrell