therine, Lady of Harrington and Bonville--oh,
give her her due titles!--is but a pageant figure in the court. If the
war-trump blew, his very vassals would laugh at a Bonville's banner, and
beneath the flag of poor William Hastings would gladly march the
best chivalry of the land. And this it is, I say, that galls her. For
evermore she is driven to compare the state she holds as the dame of
the accepted Bonville with that she lost as the wife of the disdained
Hastings."

And if, in the heat and passion that such words betrayed, Sibyll sighed
to think that something of the old remembrance yet swelled and burned,
they but impressed her more with the value of a heart in which the
characters once writ endured so long, and roused her to a tender
ambition to heal and to console.

Then looking into her own deep soul, Sibyll beheld there a fund of such
generous, pure, and noble affection, such reverence as to the fame, such
love as to the man, that she proudly felt herself worthier of Hastings
than the haughty Katherine. She entered then, as it were, the lists with
this rival,--a memory rather, so she thought, than a corporeal being;
and her eye grew brighter, her step statelier, in the excitement of the
contest, the anticipation of the triumph. For what diamond without its
flaw? What rose without its canker? And bedded deep in that exquisite
and charming nature lay the dangerous and fatal weakness which has
cursed so many victims, broken so many hearts,--the vanity of the sex.
We may now readily conceive how little predisposed was Sibyll to the
blunt advances and displeasing warnings of the Lady Bonville, and the
more so from the time in which they chanced. For here comes the answer
to the question, "Why was Sibyll sad?"

The reader may determine for himself what were the ruling motives of
Lord Hastings in the court he paid to Sibyll. Whether to pique the Lady
Bonville, and force upon her the jealous pain he restlessly sought
to inflict; whether, from the habit of his careless life, seeking the
pleasure of the moment, with little forethought of the future, and
reconciling itself to much cruelty, by that profound contempt for human
beings, man, and still more for woman, which sad experience often brings
to acute intellect; or whether, from the purer and holier complacency
with which one whose youth has fed upon nobler aspirations than manhood
cares to pursue, suns itself back to something of its earlier lustre
in the presenc