ly unsuited to her. She could find in
his society no enjoyment, and for the sympathy which she needed was
compelled to turn elsewhere. She understood that his love for her had
burnt itself out--she confessed, with intensity of self-degradation,
that his apparent affection had been born of sensuality, and had
perished in the fires it had itself kindled. Many women have, unhappily,
made some such discovery as this, but for most women there is some
distracting occupation. Had it been Sylvia's fate to live in the midst
of fashion and society, she would have found relief in the conversation
of the witty, or the homage of the distinguished. Had fortune cast her
lot in a city, Mrs. Frere might have become one of those charming women
who collect around their supper-tables whatever of male intellect is
obtainable, and who find the husband admirably useful to open his own
champagne bottles. The celebrated women who have stepped out of
their domestic circles to enchant or astonish the world, have almost
invariably been cursed with unhappy homes. But poor Sylvia was not
destined to this fortune. Cast back upon herself, she found no surcease
of pain in her own imaginings, and meeting with a man sufficiently her
elder to encourage her to talk, and sufficiently clever to induce her
to seek his society and his advice, she learnt, for the first time, to
forget her own griefs; for the first time she suffered her nature
to expand under the sun of a congenial influence. This sun, suddenly
withdrawn, her soul, grown accustomed to the warmth and light, shivered
at the gloom, and she looked about her in dismay at the dull and barren
prospect of life which lay before her. In a word, she found that the
society of North had become so far necessary to her that to be deprived
of it was a grief--notwithstanding that her husband remained to console
her.

After a week of such reflections, the barrenness of life grew
insupportable to her, and one day she came to Maurice and begged to be
sent back to Hobart Town. "I cannot live in this horrible island,"
she said. "I am getting ill. Let me go to my father for a few months,
Maurice." Maurice consented. His wife was looking ill, and Major Vickers
was an old man--a rich old man--who loved his only daughter. It was not
undesirable that Mrs. Frere should visit her father; indeed, so little
sympathy was there between the pair that, the first astonishment over,
Maurice felt rather glad to get rid of her for a