he had seen twice?
Little enough!--she pledged herself to it in the Court of Conscience!
What was she to him, who had spoken with her twice certainly; but _seen_
her--oh, how little! Why, _she_ had seen _him_ more, of the two, if one
came to close quarters with Time. See how long he was stooping over that
unfortunate dog-chain!

Sitting up in bed in the dim July dawn, wild-eyed in an unshepherded
flock of golden locks, this young lady was certainly surpassingly
beautiful. She was revolving in her poor, aching head a contingency she
had not fully allowed for. Suppose--merely to look other things in the
face, you see!--suppose there were _no_ dummy! What chance would the
poor fellow have then of winning the love of any woman, with those blind
eyes in his head? Gwen got up restlessly and went to the casement,
meeting a stream of level sunlight that the swallows outside in the ivy
were making the subject of comment, and stood looking out over the
leagues of the ancient domain of her forefathers. "Gwen o' the
Towers"--that was her name. It seemed to join chorus with her own answer
to the last question, to her satisfaction.

To offer the consolation of her love, to give all she had to give, to
this man as compensation for the great curse that had fallen on him
through the fault of her belongings, seemed to her in her excited state
easy and nowise strange--mere difficulty of the negotiation apart. She
elected to shut her eyes to a fact we and the story can guess--we are so
shrewd, you see!--and to make a parade in her own eyes of a
self-renunciation approaching that of Marcus Curtius. If only the gulf
would open to receive her she would fling herself in. She ignored the
dissimilarities of detail in the two cases, especially the conceivable
promised land at the bottom of _her_ gulf. The Roman Eques had nothing
but death and darkness to look forward to.

The difficulties of the scheme shot across her fevered conception of it.
How if, though he was not affianced to the dummy, or any other lay
figure she might provide, his was a widowed heart left barren by the
hand of Death? How if some other disappointment had marred his
life?--some passion for a woman who had rashly accepted somebody else
before meeting him? This happens we know; so did Gwen, and was sorry.
How if some minx--Lutwyche's expression--had bewitched him and slighted
him? He might nurse a false ideal of her till Doomsday. Men did
sometimes, _coeteris paribus_. But