age, who knows all his
affairs, and has helped, from pure friendship, to make them as bad as
they are! Levy was thus suddenly summoned. Egerton, who was in great
haste, did not at first communicate to him the name of the intended
bride; but he said enough of the imprudence of the marriage, and his
reasons for secrecy, to bring on himself the strongest remonstrances;
for Levy had always reckoned on Egerton's making a wealthy
marriage,--leaving to Egerton the wife, and hoping to appropriate to
himself the wealth, all in the natural course of business. Egerton did
not listen to him, but hurried him on towards the place at which the
ceremony was to be performed; and Levy actually saw the bride before
he had learned her name. The usurer masked his raging emotions, and
fulfilled his part in the rites. His smile, when he congratulated the
bride, might have shot cold into her heart; but her eyes were cast on
the earth, seeing there but a shadow from heaven, and her heart was
blindly sheltering itself in the bosom to which it was given evermore.
She did not perceive the smile of hate that barbed the words of joy.
Nora never thought it necessary later to tell Egerton that Levy had been
a refused suitor. Indeed, with the exquisite tact of love, she saw that
such a confidence, the idea of such a rival, would have wounded the
pride of her high-bred, well-born husband.

And now, while Harley L'Estrange, frantic with the news that Nora had
left Lady Jane's roof, and purposely misled into wrong directions, was
seeking to trace her refuge in vain, now Egerton, in an assumed name,
in a remote quarter, far from the clubs, in which his word was oracular,
far from the pursuits, whether of pastime or toil, that had hitherto
engrossed his active mind, gave himself up, with wonder at his own
surrender, to the only vision of fairyland that ever weighs down the
watchful eyelids of hard ambition. The world for a while shut out, he
missed it not. He knew not of it. He looked into two loving eyes that
haunted him ever after, through a stern and arid existence, and said
murmuringly, "Why, this, then, is real happiness!" Often, often, in the
solitude of other years, to repeat to himself the same words, save that
for is, he then murmured was! And Nora, with her grand, full heart,
all her luxuriant wealth of fancy and of thought, child of light and of
song, did she then never discover that there was something comparatively
narrow and sterile in the nat