one she
loved, and who loved her, in the glorious mansions there.

From the time of her nurse's death, the whole current of Olive's life
changed. It cast no shadow over the memory of the deep affection
lost, to say that the full tide of living love now flowed towards Mrs.
Rothesay as it had never done before, perhaps never would have done but
for Elspie's death. And truly the mother's heart now thirsted for that
flood.

For seven years the little cloud which appeared when Captain Rothesay
returned, had risen up between husband and wife, increasing slowly but
surely, and casting a shadow over their married home. Like many another
pair who wed in the heat of passion, or the wilful caprice of youth,
their characters, never very similar, had grown less so day by day,
until their two lives had severed wider and wider. There was no open
dissension that the wicked world could take hold of, to glut its eager
eyes with the spectacle of an unhappy marriage; but the chasm was there,
a gulf of coldness, indifference, and distrust, which no foot of love
would ever cross.

Angus Rothesay was a disappointed man. At five-and-twenty he had taken a
beautiful, playful, half-educated child,

"His bride and his darling to be,"

forgetting that at thirty-five he should need a sensible woman to be his
trustworthy sympathising wife, the careful and thoughtful mistress of
his household. When hard experience had made him old and wise, even a
little before his time, he came home expecting to find her old and wise
too. The hope failed. He found Sybilla as he had left her--a very child.
Ductile and loving as she was, he might even then have guided her mind,
have formed her character, in fact, have made her anything he liked. But
he would not do it; he was too proud. He brooded over his disappointed
hope in silence and reserve; and though he reproached her not, and never
ceased to love her in his own cold way, yet all respect and sympathy
were gone. Her ways were not his ways, and was it the place of a man and
a husband to bend? After a few years of struggling, less with her than
with himself, he decided that he would take his own separate course, and
let her take hers.

He did so. At first she tried to win him back, not with a woman's sweet
and placid dignity of love, never failing, never tiring, yet invisible
as a rivulet that runs through deep green bushes, scarcely heard and
never seen. Sybilla's arts--the only arts she knew--were t