f she could, still
she must admire him."

"Are you speaking of Silverbridge now?"

"Of course I am speaking of Silverbridge. I suppose I ought to hide
it all and not to tell you. But as you are the only person I do
tell, you must put up with me. Yes;--when I taxed him with his
falsehood,--for he had been false,--he answered me with those very
words! 'I have changed my mind.' He could not lie. To speak the truth
was a necessity to him, even at the expense of his gallantry, almost
of his humanity."

"Has he been false to you, Mabel?"

"Of course he has. But there is nothing to quarrel about, if you mean
that. People do not quarrel now about such things. A girl has to
fight her own battle with her own pluck and her own wits. As with
these weapons she is generally stronger than her enemy, she succeeds
sometimes although everything else is against her. I think I am
courageous, but his courage beat mine. I craned at the first fence.
When he was willing to swallow my bait, my hand was not firm enough
to strike the hook in his jaws. Had I not quailed then I think I
should have--'had him'."

"It is horrid to hear you talk like this." She was leaning over from
her seat, looking, black as she was, so much older than her wont,
with something about her of that unworldly serious thoughtfulness
which a mourning garb always gives. And yet her words were so
worldly, so unfeminine!

"I have got to tell the truth to somebody. It was so, just as I have
said. Of course I did not love him. How could I love him after what
has passed? But there need have been nothing much in that. I don't
suppose that Dukes' eldest sons often get married for love."

"Miss Boncassen loves him."

"I dare say the beggar's daughter loved King Cophetua. When you come
to distances such as that, there can be love. The very fact that a
man should have descended so far in quest of beauty,--the flattery
of it alone,--will produce love. When the angels came after the
daughters of men of course the daughters of men loved them. The
distance between him and me is not great enough to have produced that
sort of worship. There was no reason why Lady Mabel Grex should not
be good enough wife for the son of the Duke of Omnium."

"Certainly not."

"And therefore I was not struck, as by the shining of a light from
heaven. I cannot say I loved him. Frank,--I am beyond worshipping
even an angel from heaven!"

"Then I do not know that you could blame him," he said ver