omen, an almost envious admiration of English
excellence. To have been allowed to forget the past and to live the
life of an English lady would have been heaven to her. But she, who
was sometimes scorned and sometimes feared in the eastern cities of
her own country, whose name had become almost a proverb for violence
out in the far West,--how could she dare to hope that her lot should be
so changed for her?

She had reminded Paul that she had required to be asked often before
she had consented to be his wife; but she did not tell him that that
hesitation had arisen from her own conviction of her own unfitness.
But it had been so. Circumstances had made her what she was.
Circumstances had been cruel to her. But she could not now alter them.
Then gradually, as she came to believe in his love, as she lost
herself in love for him, she told herself that she would be changed.
She had, however, almost known that it could not be so. But this man
had relatives, had business, had property in her own country. Though
she could not be made happy in England, might not a prosperous life
be opened for him in the far West? Then had risen the offer of that
journey to Mexico with much probability that work of no ordinary
kind might detain him there for years. With what joy would she have
accompanied him as his wife! For that at any rate she would have been
fit.

She was conscious, perhaps too conscious, of her own beauty. That at
any rate, she felt, had not deserted her. She was hardly aware that
time was touching it. And she knew herself to be clever, capable of
causing happiness, and mirth and comfort. She had the qualities of a
good comrade--which are so much in a woman. She knew all this of
herself. If he and she could be together in some country in which
those stories of her past life would be matter of indifference, could
she not make him happy? But what was she that a man should give up
everything and go away and spend his days in some half-barbarous
country for her alone? She knew it all and was hardly angry with him
in that he had decided against her. But treated as she had been she
must play her game with such weapons as she possessed. It was
consonant with her old character, it was consonant with her present
plans that she should at any rate seem to be angry.

Sitting there alone late into the night she made many plans, but the
plan that seemed best to suit the present frame of her mind was the
writing of a letter to Paul b