lanced, in passing, at Mr. Vawdrey's house;
afterwards, she shunned that region. The memories it revived were
infinitely painful. She saw herself an immature and foolish girl,
behaving in a way which, for all its affectation of reserve and dignity,
no doubt offered to such a man as Lionel Tarrant a hint that here, if he
chose, he might make a facile conquest. Had he not acted upon the
hint? It wrung her heart with shame to remember how, in those days, she
followed the lure of a crude imagination. A year ago? Oh, a lifetime!

Unwilling, now, to justify herself with the plea of love; doubtful, in
very truth, whether her passion merited that name; she looked back in
the stern spirit of a woman judging another's frailty. What treatment
could she have anticipated at the hands of her lover save that she had
received? He married her--it was much; he forsook her--it was natural.
The truth of which she had caught troublous glimpses in the heyday of
her folly now stood revealed as pitiless condemnation. Tarrant never
respected her, never thought of her as a woman whom he could seriously
woo and wed. She had a certain power over his emotions, and not the
sensual alone; but his love would not endure the test of absence. From
the other side of the Atlantic he saw her as he had seen her at first,
and shrank from returning to the bondage which in a weak moment he had
accepted.

One night about this time she said to herself:

'I was his mistress, never his wife.'

And all her desperate endeavours to obscure the history of their love,
to assert herself as worthy to be called wife, mother, had fallen
fruitless. Those long imploring letters, despatched to America from her
solitude by the Cornish sea, elicited nothing but a word or two which
sounded more like pity than affection. Pity does not suffice to recall
the wandering steps of a man wedded against his will.

In her heart, she absolved him of all baseness. The man of ignoble
thought would have been influenced by her market value as a wife.
Tarrant, all the more because he was reduced to poverty, would
resolutely forget the crude advantage of remaining faithful to her.

Herein Nancy proved herself more akin to her father than she had ever
seemed when Stephen Lord sought eagerly in her character for hopeful
traits.

The severity of her self-judgment, and the indulgence tempering her
attitude towards Tarrant, declared a love which had survived its phase
of youthful passion. But