e and the converse of a young bright soul,--whatever,
in brief, the earlier motives of gallantries to Sibyll, once begun,
constantly renewed, by degrees wilder and warmer and guiltier emotions
roused up in the universal and all-conquering lover the vice of his
softer nature. When calm and unimpassioned, his conscience had said
to him, "Thou shalt spare that flower." But when once the passion was
roused within him, the purity of the flower was forgotten in the breath
of its voluptuous sweetness.

And but three days before the scene we have described with Katherine,
Sibyll's fabric of hope fell to the dust. For Hastings spoke for the
first time of love, for the first time knelt at her feet, for the
first time, clasping to his heart that virgin hand, poured forth the
protestation and the vow. And oh! woe--woe! for the first time she
learned how cheaply the great man held the poor maiden's love, how
little he deemed that purity and genius and affection equalled the
possessor of fame and wealth and power; for plainly visible, boldly
shown and spoken, the love that she had foreseen as a glory from the
heaven sought but to humble her to the dust.

The anguish of that moment was unspeakable,--and she spoke it not. But
as she broke from the profaning clasp, as escaping to the threshold she
cast on the unworthy wooer one look of such reproachful sorrow as told
at once all her love and all her horror, the first act in the eternal
tragedy of man's wrong and woman's grief was closed. And therefore was
Sibyll sad!

CHAPTER V. KATHERINE.

For several days Hastings avoided Sibyll; in truth, he felt remorse for
his design, and in his various, active, and brilliant life he had not
the leisure for obstinate and systematic siege to a single virtue, nor
was he, perhaps, any longer capable of deep and enduring passion; his
heart, like that of many a chevalier in the earlier day, had lavished
itself upon one object, and sullenly, upon regrets and dreams, and vain
anger and idle scorn, it had exhausted those sentiments which make
the sum of true love. And so, like Petrarch, whom his taste and fancy
worshipped, and many another votary of the gentil Dieu, while his
imagination devoted itself to the chaste and distant ideal--the
spiritual Laura--his senses, ever vagrant and disengaged, settled
without scruple upon the thousand Cynthias of the minute. But then those
Cynthias were, for the most part, and especially of late years, easy and