ich he succeeded in attaching her to him it is
unnecessary to describe. Suffice it to say that little by little she
grew to believe that in him the impeccable resided. She had accustomed
herself to consider love in the light of a plant which if rightly tended
would bloom into a witherless rose. She had told him this, and together
they had watched the bud expand, and when at last it was fulfilled to
the tips he saw it in her eyes. That evening, when he had gone, the
sense of happiness was so acute that she became quasi-hysterical. The
joy of love, slowly intercepted and then wholly revealed, vibrated
through the chords of her being, overwhelming her with the force of an
unexperienced emotion, and throwing her for relief into a paroxysm of
tears. Then followed a day of wonder, in which hallucinations of delight
alternated with tremors of self-depreciation. It seemed to her that she
was unworthy of such an one as he. For, to her, in her inexperience, he
was perfection indeed, one unsulliable and mailed in right. And then,
abruptly, as such things occur, without so much as a monition, she read
in public print that he had been summoned as a co-respondent. To
overwrought nerves as were hers, the announcement was rapider in its
effect than a microbe. A fever came that was obliterating as the morrow
of steps on the sand. For a week she was delirious, and when at last she
left her room the expression of her face had altered. She felt no anger,
only an immense distrust of the validity of her intuitions. Had Dugald
Maule been in trouble, she would have, if need were, forsaken life for
his sake; but the Dugald Maule for whom she would have been brave had
existed only in her own imagination. It was this that brought the fever,
and when the fever went, disgust came in its place. It was then that the
expression of face altered. She looked like one who is done with love.
Presently, and while she was still convalescent, her father sent her
abroad with friends, and when she returned, Dugald Maule had to her the
reality of a bad dream, a nightmare that she might have experienced in
the broad light of an earlier day.

In the course of that winter it so happened that her father one evening
brought in to dinner a man whom he introduced as Mr. Usselex. Eden had
never seen him before and for the moment she did not experience any
notable desire to see him again. She attended, however, with becoming
grace to the duties of hostess, and as the conv