ssibility of being
loved, as Lady Markland, now seven-and-twenty, had concluded herself
to be.

Seven-and-twenty! ah, but that was not all! a wife already, to whom
it was shame so much as to think of any other man. A second marriage
appeared to her, as to many women, a sort of atheism; a giving up of the
religion of the immortal. If marriage is a tie that endures for ever, as
it is every happy woman's creed it is, how could she die, how dare ever
to look in the face a man whom because he was dead,--no, more than that,
because a change had happened to him which was no doing of his--she
had abandoned for another man? This argument made it once and for ever
impossible to contemplate such an act. Therefore it was to another man's
wife that this poor boy, this generous enthusiast, was giving his all.
But a woman cannot have such a gift laid down at her feet without a
sensation of gratitude, without a certain pleasure even amid the pain
in that vindication of herself and her womanhood which he makes to her,
raising her in her own esteem. Therefore she could not be hard, could
not be angry. Poor boy! to think of what it was he was throwing away;
and of the beating heart full of foolish passion with which he was coming
to say words which her imagination snatched at, then retired from, trying
not to anticipate them, not to be curious, not to be moved in advance by
what he must say. But then she paused to ask herself whether she could
not prevent him, whether she could not spare him these fruitless words.
Would not it be wrong to let him say them when it was so certain what
her response must be? She might stop him, perhaps, in the utterance;
tell him--with what sympathy, with what tenderness! that it must not be;
that not for her were such expressions possible; that he was mistaking
himself, and his own heart, in which pity was moving, not love. Could
she do this? She felt a quick pang of disappointment in the thought
of thus not hearing what he had to say: but it would be kinder to
him--perhaps: would it be kinder?--to stop those words on his lips,
words that should only be said to the woman who could listen to them; to
the happy young creature whom some time or other he might still love.
This was the confusion of thought in Lady Markland's mind while she sat
by her writing-table among her papers, turning them over with nervous
hands, now opening, now closing again the letters to which she could
give no attention; letters, a coo