the pure, the bright, the unsullied, unsoiled
thing, of the possession of which he had thought so much. He had
never spoken of his hopes about her even to his wife, but in the
silence of his very silent life he had thought much of the day when
he would give her to some noble youth,--noble with all gifts of
nobility, including rank and wealth,--who might be fit to receive
her. Now, even though no one else should know it,--and all would
know it,--she would be the girl who had condescended to love young
Tregear.

His own Duchess, she whose loss to him now was as though he had lost
half his limbs,--had not she in the same way loved a Tregear, or
worse than a Tregear, in her early days? Ah yes! And though his Cora
had been so much to him, had he not often felt, had he not been
feeling all his days, that Fate had robbed him of the sweetest joy
that is given to man, in that she had not come to him loving him with
her early spring of love, as she had loved that poor ne'er-do-well?
How infinite had been his regrets. How often had he told himself
that, with all that Fortune had given him, still Fortune had been
unjust to him because he had been robbed of that. Not to save his
life could he have whispered a word of this to any one, but he had
felt it. He had felt it for years. Dear as she had been, she had not
been quite what she should have been but for that. And now this girl
of his, who was so much dearer to him than anything else left to him,
was doing exactly as her mother had done. The young man might be
stamped out. He might be made to vanish as that other young man had
vanished. But the fact that he had been there, cherished in the
girl's heart,--that could not be stamped out.

He struggled gallantly to acquit the memory of his wife. He could
best do that by leaning with the full weight of his mind on the
presumed iniquity of Mrs. Finn. Had he not known from the first that
the woman was an adventuress? And had he not declared to himself over
and over again that between such a one and himself there should be no
intercourse, no common feeling? He had allowed himself to be talked
into an intimacy, to be talked almost into an affection. And this was
the result!

And how should he treat this matter in his coming interview with his
son;--or should he make an allusion to it? At first it seemed as
though it would be impossible for him to give his mind to that other
subject. How could he enforce the merits of political Liberali