wherever she was
told, concurred with everything, and, smiling, expressed her gratitude
for all the trouble they were taking on her behalf. Her only impression
throughout was that property was a great source of worry; and what a
fortunate thing it was for her to have met with those who understood its
interests, and could deal with its eventualities! Of her large fortune
she actually knew nothing. Little jests would be bandied, at breakfast
and dinner, about May being the owner of vast tracts in the far West,
territories wide as principalities, with mines here and great forests
there, and so on, and sportive allusions to her one day becoming the
queen of some far-away land beyond the sea. Save in such laughing guise
as this she never approached the theme, nor cared for it.

Between May and Clara a close friendship had grown up. Besides the
tastes that united them, there was another and a very tender bond that
linked their hearts together. They were confidantes. May told Clara that
she really loved Charles Heathcote, and never knew it till they were
separated. She owned that if his careless, half-indifferent way had
piqued her, it was only after she had been taught to resent it. She
had once even regarded it as the type of his manly, independent nature,
which she now believed to be the true version of his character; and then
there was a secret--a real young-lady secret--between them, fastest of
all the bonds that ever bound such hearts together.

May fancied or imagined that young Layton had gone away, trusting that
time was to plead for him, and that absence was to appeal in his behalf.
Perhaps he had said so; perhaps he hoped it; perhaps it was a mere dream
of her own. Who knows these things? In that same court of Cupid fancies
are just as valid as affidavits, and the vaguest illusions quite as much
evidence as testimony taken on oath.

Now, amongst all the sorrows that a young lady loves best to weep over,
there is not one whose ecstasy can compare with the affliction for the
poor fellow who loves her to madness, but whose affection she cannot
return. It is a very strange and curious fact--and fact it is--that this
same tie of a rejected devotion will occasionally exact sacrifices just
as great as the most absorbing passion.

To have gained a man's heart, as it were, in spite of him,--to have
become the depositary of all his hopes, and yet not given him one scrap
of a receipt for his whole investment,--has a wonderf