she
had never known, and never could know upon earth! Yet, dear as these two
persons were to her, she would have seen that fair girl and the manly
form beside her shrouded in their coffins, if that could have brought
back one short twelve-months of the passionate insanity which had won
Lord Hope to cast aside all restraint and fiercely wrench apart the most
sacred ties in order to make her his wife. She asked for
impossibilities. Love born in tumult and founded in selfishness must
have its reactions, and between those two the shadow of a wronged woman
was forever falling; and, struggle as they would, it grew colder and
darker every year. But upon these two persons time operated differently.
The wild impetuosity of his character had hardened into reserve. His
ambition was to stand high among men of his own class--to be known as a
statesman of power in the realm.

But, in all this Rachael knew that she was a drawback and a heavy weight
upon his aspirations. Was it that she was less bright or beautiful? No,
no. Her mirror contradicted the _one_ doubt, and the power which she
felt in her own genius rebuked the other.

Once give her a foothold among the men and women who had so persistently
considered her as an intruder, and the old vigor and pride of her life
would come back with it: the idolatry which had induced that infatuated
man to overlook these stumbling blocks to his pride and impediments to
his ambition would surely revive.

"Let him see me at court; let him compare me with the women whose
cutting disdain wounds me to death, because it disturbs him; let him
place me where this intellect can have free scope, and never on this
earth was there a woman who would work out a husband's greatness so
thoroughly."

In the first years of her marriage, Rachael would say these things to
herself, in the bitterness of her humiliation and disappointment.
Others, less beautiful and lacking her talent, had been again and again
introduced from lower ranks into the nobility of England, accepted by
its queen, and honored by society. Why was she alone so persistently
excluded? The answer was always ready, full of bitterness. The enmity of
old Lady Carset had done it all. It was her influence that had closed
the queen's drawing-room against Lord Hope's second wife. It was her
charge regarding the Carset diamonds that had made Rachael shrink from
wearing the family jewels, which justly belonged to her as Lord Hope's
property. It was