t least, had no right to complain. If the real Sheila turned
out to be something different from the Sheila of his fancy, he had been
abundantly warned that such would be the case. He had even accepted it
as probable, and said that as the Sheila whom he might come to know must
doubtless be better than the Sheila whom he had imagined, there was
little danger in store for either. He would love the true Sheila even
better than the creature of his brain. Had he done so? He found beside
him this proud and sensitive Highland girl, full of generous impulses
that craved for the practical work of helping other people, longing,
with the desire of a caged bird, for the free winds and light of heaven,
the sight of hills and the sound of seas, and he could not understand
why she should not conform to the usages of city life. He was
disappointed that she did not do so. The imaginative Sheila, who was to
appear as a wonderful sea-princess in London drawing-rooms, had
disappeared now; and the real Sheila, who did not care to go with him
into that society which he loved or affected to love, he had not learned
to know.

And had she been mistaken in her estimate of Frank Lavender's character?
At the very moment of her leaving her husband's house, if she had been
asked the question, she would have turned and proudly answered, "No!"
She had been disappointed--so grievously disappointed that her heart
seemed to be breaking over it--but the manner in which Frank Lavender
had fallen away from all the promise he had given was due not to
himself, but to the influence of the society around him. Of that she was
quite assured. He had shown himself careless, indifferent, inconsiderate
to the verge of cruelty; but he was not, she had convinced herself,
consciously cruel, nor yet selfish, nor radically bad-hearted in any
way. In her opinion, at least, he was courageously sincere, to the verge
of shocking people who mistook his frankness for impudence. He was
recklessly generous: he would have given the coat off his back to a
beggar at the instigation of a sudden impulse, provided he could have
got into a cab before any of his friends saw him. He had rare abilities,
and at times wildly ambitious dreams, not of his own glorification, but
of what he would do to celebrate the beauty and the graces of the
princess whom he fancied he had married. It may seem hard of belief that
this man, judging him by his actions at this time, could have had
anything of tho