r, perhaps in an excited, genial moment, when she had some of
her favourites round her--her old beaux, for instance, yourself and
Helstone, with whom she is so playful, pleasant, and eloquent. I have
watched her when she was most natural, most lively, and most lovely; my
judgment has pronounced her beautiful. Beautiful she is at times, when
her mood and her array partake of the splendid. I have drawn a little
nearer, feeling that our terms of acquaintance gave me the right of
approach. I have joined the circle round her seat, caught her eye, and
mastered her attention; then we have conversed; and others, thinking me,
perhaps, peculiarly privileged, have withdrawn by degrees, and left us
alone. Were we happy thus left? For myself, I must say No. Always a
feeling of constraint came over me; always I was disposed to be stern
and strange. We talked politics and business. No soft sense of domestic
intimacy ever opened our hearts, or thawed our language and made it flow
easy and limpid. If we had confidences, they were confidences of the
counting-house, not of the heart. Nothing in her cherished affection in
me, made me better, gentler; she only stirred my brain and whetted my
acuteness. She never crept into my heart or influenced its pulse; and
for this good reason, no doubt, because I had not the secret of making
her love me."

"Well, lad, it is a queer thing. I might laugh at thee, and reckon to
despise thy refinements; but as it is dark night and we are by
ourselves, I don't mind telling thee that thy talk brings back a glimpse
of my own past life. Twenty-five years ago I tried to persuade a
beautiful woman to love me, and she would not. I had not the key to her
nature; she was a stone wall to me, doorless and windowless."

"But you loved _her_, Yorke; you worshipped Mary Cave. Your conduct,
after all, was that of a man--never of a fortune-hunter."

"Ay, I _did_ love her; but then she was beautiful as the moon we do
_not_ see to-night. There is naught like her in these days. Miss
Helstone, maybe, has a look of her, but nobody else."

"Who has a look of her?"

"That black-coated tyrant's niece--that quiet, delicate Miss Helstone.
Many a time I have put on my spectacles to look at the lassie in church,
because she has gentle blue een, wi' long lashes; and when she sits in
shadow, and is very still and very pale, and is, happen, about to fall
asleep wi' the length of the sermon and the heat of the biggin', she is
as lik