very handy, ten miles out. We'll have the Opera troupe
there, and you shall command the Opera.'

Her beauty sweetened to thank him.

If, as Livia said, his passion for her was unchanged, the generosity
manifested in the considerate screen it wore over any physical betrayal
of it, deserved the lustre of her eyes. It dwelt a moment, vivid with
the heart close behind and remorseful for misreading of old his fine
character. Here was a young man who could be the very kindest of friends
to the woman rejecting him to wed another. Her smile wavered. How shall
a loving wife express warmth of sentiment elsewhere, without the one
beam too much, that plunges her on a tideway? His claim of nothing
called for everything short of the proscribed. She gave him her beauty
in fullest flower.

It had the appearance of a temptation; and he was not tempted, though he
admired; his thought being, Husband of the thing!

But he admired. That condition awakened his unsatisfied past days to
desire positive proof of her worthlessness. The past days writhed in
him. The present were loveless, entirely cold. He had not even the
wish to press her hand. The market held beautiful women of a like
description. He wished simply to see her proved the thing he read her
to be: and not proved as such by himself. He was unable to summon or
imagine emotion enough for him to simulate the forms by which fair women
are wooed to their perdition. For all he cared, any man on earth might
try, succeed or fail, as long as he had visual assurance that she
coveted, a slave to the pleasures commanded by the wealth once disdained
by her. Till that time, he could not feel himself perfectly free.

Dame Gossip prefers to ejaculate. Young men are mysteries! and bowl us
onward. No one ever did comprehend the Earl of Fleetwood, she says: he
was bad, he was good; he was whimsical and stedfast; a splendid figure,
a mark for ridicule; romantic and a close arithmetician; often a devil,
sometimes the humanest of creatures.

In fine, he was a millionaire nobleman, owning to a considerable
infusion of Welsh blood in the composition of him. Now, to the Cymry and
to the pure Kelt, the past is at their elbows continually. The past of
their lives has lost neither face nor voice behind the shroud; nor are
the passions of the flesh, nor is the animate soul, wanting to it. Other
races forfeit infancy, forfeit youth and manhood with their progression
to the wisdom age may bestow. These ha