e him are fond of women who don't
profess to be strong. Well, if I can help her, I will do so--it will be
something to see her completely happy, and him too."

Whereupon, for no apparent reason, the tears sprang into Minola's eyes,
and she found a vain wish arising in her heart that she had never
renewed her acquaintance with Lucy Money, never been persuaded by Mary
Blanchet to visit her, never stood upon her threshold and met Victor
Heron there.

"Why not wish at once that I had never been born?" she said, half
tearful, half scornful of her tears. "One thing is as easy now as the
other, and as useful, and not to have been born would have saved many
idle hours and much heartache."

CHAPTER XV.

A MORNING CONFIDENCE.

Minola rose next morning with a bewildering and oppressed sense of
disappointment and defeat. The whole of her scheme of life had broken
down. Her little bubble world had burst. All her plans of bold
independence and of contented life, of isolation from social trammels,
and freedom from woman's weaknesses, had broken down. She had always
thought scorn of those who said that women could not feel friendship for
men without danger of feeling love--and now, what was she but a cruel,
mocking evidence of the folly of her confidence? Alas, no romantic
schoolgirl could have fallen more suddenly into love than Minola had
done. There was but one man whom she had ever seen with whom she had
coveted a friendship, and she now knew, only too well, that in her
breast the friendship had already caught fire and blazed into love.
Where was Alceste now, and the Alceste standard by which she had
proposed to test all men and women, well convinced beforehand that she
would find them wanting? She could not even flatter herself that she had
been faithful to her faith, and that if she had succumbed at the very
outset, it was because the first comer actually proved to be an Alceste.
No, she could not cram this complacent conviction into her mind. Victor
Heron was a generous and noble-hearted young man, she felt assured; but
she had not fallen in love with him because of any assurance that he was
like the hero of her girlhood. She made no attempt to deceive herself in
this way. In her proud resentment of her weakness she even trampled upon
it with undeserved scorn. "I fell in love with him," she said to
herself, "just as the silliest girl falls in love--because he was there,
and I couldn't help it."

It was not merely