n sudden virgin
terror and thrust it away at the back of her wardrobe.

There it had lain until disinterred in the hurried search for linen for
Mr. Raoul's wound. Next morning Dorothea was on the point of hiding it
again, when, as she opened the covers idly, her eyes fell on these lines

"But at my back I alwaies hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before me lie
Desarts of vast Eternitie . . ."

She read on. The poem, after all, turned out to be but a lover's appeal
to his mistress to give over coyness and use time while she might; but
Dorothea wondered why its solemn language should have hit her
namesake's fancy, and, turning a few more pages, discovered that this
merry dead girl had chosen and copied out other verses which were more
than solemn. How had she dug these gloomy gems out of Donne, Ford,
Webster, and set them here among loose songs and loose epigrams from
_Wit's Remembrancer_ and the like? for gems they were, though Dorothea
did not know it nor whence they came. Dorothea had small sense of
poetry: it was the personal interest which led her on. To be sure the
little animal (she had already begun to construct a picture of her)
might have secreted these things for no more reason than their beauty,
as a squirrel will pick up a ruby ring and hide it among his nuts.
But why were they, all so darkly terrible? Had she, being young, been
afraid to die? Rather it seemed as if now and then, in the midst of
her mirth, she had paused and been afraid to live.

And in the end she had married a Devonshire squire, which on the face
of it is no darkly romantic thing to do. But it was over the maiden
that our Dorothea pondered, until by and by the small shade took
features and a place in her leisure time: a very companionable shade,
though tantalising; and innocent, though given to mischievously
sportive hints. Dorothea sometimes wondered what her own fate would
have been, with this naughtiness in her young blood--and this
seriousness.

It was sentiment, of course; but it is also a fact that this ghost of
a kinswoman brought help to her. For such a hurt as hers the specific
is to get away from self and look into such human thought as is kindly
yet judicial. Some find this help in philosophy, many more in wise
Dorothea had no philosophy, and no human being to consult; for
admirably as Endymion had behaved, he remained a person with obvious
limits. The General held aloof: she had no reaso