own
girlish altar?...

He was her maiden's ideal. He was her prince from a story-book, come
true. If any flaw were conceivable in so complete a fulfilment, it might
have been imagined only in this very fact of Hugo's all-perfectness.
Marrying upward, in the nature of the case, involved a large material
one-sidedness: that was the object and the glory of it all. Yet now, in
her romantic situation, there woke new emotions in Cally Heth, and she
dimly perceived that her lifelong ambition carried, through its very
advantages, a subtle disadvantage to the heart. Unsuspected tendernesses
seemed to stir within her, and she was aware of the vague wish to
bestow upon her lover, to make him a full gift for a gift. However, it
was clear that Canning had everything. For the priceless boons he was to
confer upon her, she saw that she had nothing to give him in return,
except herself.

With this return, Canning, for his part, seemed amply content. When the
hour came when, for his manhood, he must report himself again to that
office in New York which had not known his face since October, he took
the parting hard. He was to return again before April was out, for a
fortnight's stay preceding his betrothed's departure for Europe; yet he
seemed hardly able to tear himself away....

"I hope we shall have a long life together," said he, a bright gleam in
his handsome eyes, "but it's certain, my own dear, that we'll never be
engaged but once...."

Moved herself by the farewells, she teasingly reminded him of his
one-time impatience to fly back to lights and home. But Canning,
straining her to his heart, replied that home was where the heart is,
and was admitted to have the best of the argument.

* * * * *

Carlisle's world had been knocked far out of its ordered orbit. Hugo
Canning, possessed by her, was so towering a fact that it threw the
whole horizon into a new perspective. Between this shining state and the
winter of discontent, there was no imaginable connection. Cause and
effect must turn a new page, life's continuity start afresh.

So it seemed, in love's first bloom. And yet, circumstances being as
they were, it was hardly possible that Carlisle should at one stroke
completely cut herself off from the past, as Florrie Willing constantly
did, as the French people once did, by means of their well-known
Revolution.

In Hugo's absence (full as the days were with questions of the
trousseau, rende