light-won nymphs; their coyest were of another clay from the tender but
lofty Sibyll. And Hastings shrunk from the cold-blooded and deliberate
seduction of one so pure, while he could not reconcile his mind to
contemplate marriage with a girl who could give nothing to his ambition;
and yet it was not in this last reluctance only his ambition that
startled and recoiled. In that strange tyranny over his whole soul which
Katherine Bonville secretly exercised, he did not dare to place a new
barrier evermore between her and himself. The Lord Bonville was of
infirm health; he had been more than once near to death's door; and
Hastings, in every succeeding fancy that beguiled his path, recalled the
thrill of his heart when it had whispered "Katherine, the loved of thy
youth, may yet be thine!" And then that Katherine rose before him,
not as she now swept the earth, with haughty step and frigid eye and
disdainful lip, but as--in all her bloom of maiden beauty, before the
temper was soured or the pride aroused--she had met him in the summer
twilight, by the trysting-tree, broken with him the golden ring of
faith, and wept upon his bosom.

And yet, during his brief and self-inflicted absence from Sibyll, this
wayward and singular personage, who was never weak but to women, and
ever weak to them, felt that she had made herself far dearer to him than
he had at first supposed it possible. He missed that face, ever,
till the last interview, so confiding in the unconsciously betrayed
affection. He felt how superior in sweetness and yet in intellect Sibyll
was to Katherine; there was more in common between her mind and his in
all things, save one. But oh, that one exception!--what a world lies
within it,--the memory of the spring of life! In fact, though Hastings
knew it not, he was in love with two objects at once; the one, a
chimera, a fancy, an ideal, an Eidolon, under the name of Katherine;
the other, youth and freshness and mind and heart and a living shape of
beauty, under the name of Sibyll. Often does this double love happen to
men; but when it does, alas for the human object! for the shadowy and
the spiritual one is immortal,--until, indeed, it be possessed!

It might be, perhaps, with a resolute desire to conquer the new love and
confirm the old that Hastings, one morning, repaired to the house of the
Lady Bonville, for her visit to the court had expired. It was a large
mansion, without the Lud Gate.

He found the dame in