ears
without doing anything, most distinguished trait of all. Hence,
Pauline's remark; how could Miss Cordova fully understand or properly
sympathize with the altered conditions by which the daughter of the
manor was now second in importance to one of a family of menials, the
flighty, giggling, half-witted Artemise-Palmyre, whose marriage to
Henry Clairville was an accepted fact.

"You cannot understand," Pauline had said for the tenth or eleventh
time, and Miss Cordova listened, outwardly smiling and not immediately
replying.

"Do you suppose your brother's marriage was legal and binding?" she
said after a while, and Pauline stopped in her walk. The idea was not
altogether new.

"I fancy it must have been," she managed to say carelessly. "Dr.
Renaud and his Reverence know all about it, and even if it were not,
where is the money to enable me to--how do you say--contest it?"

"Wouldn't Mr. Poussette lend it to you?"

"Oh, what an idea! Do you think I would take it from him, I, a
Clairville?"

She had nearly used the once-despised prefix and called herself a De
Clairville, for since Henry's death her intolerant view of his darling
project had strangely altered; so many things were slipping from her
grasp that she clutched at anything which promised well for the future.

"Well, I'm sure you deserve money, Pauline, from one quarter or
another; you've worked hard enough for it, I know, and now I do hope
your Mr. Hawtree will turn up soon and be all right, and that you'll be
happily married to him and get away for a time from all these troubles.
I want you should know, Pauline, that I think it was noble of you to
work so hard to raise that money to keep little Angeel; yes, I call it
noble, and I'm proud of you and sorry I ever thought----"

She paused and Pauline took up the unfinished phrase.

"Sorry you ever thought she was mine? I forgive you, my dear, but
about my nobility, make no mistake. What I did I did, but I did it all
coldly, passively, with nothing but hatred and loathing in my heart,
with nothing but pride and selfishness setting me on to do it. I know
this was wrong, but I could not get into any other frame of mind; I
could never overcome my horror and repulsion of the whole matter. And
now--it is just as bad--worse. If I thought I should have to live with
her, with them, I could not stand it, Sara, I could not, I could not!
Why must I be tried so, why must I suffer so? Oh, it is because I