ne attorney, Miss
Herne numbered as having been driven into a state of dogged despair on
that triumphal occasion. Mr. Holmes may have quarrelled with the
rendering, doubting to himself if her lip were not too thick, her eye
too brassy and pale a blue for the queen of months; though I do not
believe he thought at all about it. Yet the picture clung to his
memory.

As he slowly paced the room to-day, thinking of this woman as his wife,
light blue eyes and yellow hair and the unclean sweetness of
jasmine-flowers mixed with the hot sunshine and smells of the mill. He
could think of her in no other light. He might have done so; for the
poor girl had her other sides for view. She had one of those sharp,
tawdry intellects whose possessors are always reckoned "brilliant
women, fine talkers." She was (aside from the necessary sarcasm to
keep up this reputation) a good-humoured soul enough,--when no one
stood in her way. But if her shallow virtues or vices were palpable at
all to him, they became one with the torpid beauty of the oppressive
summer day, and weighed on him alike with a vague disgust. The woman
luxuriated in perfume; some heavy odour always hung about her. Holmes,
thinking of her now, fancied he felt it stifling the air, and opened
the window for breath. Patchouli or copperas,--what was the
difference? The mill and his future wife came to him together; it was
scarcely his fault, if he thought of them as one, or muttered,
"Damnable clog!" as he sat down to write, his cold eye growing colder.
But he did not argue the question any longer; decision had come keenly
in one moment, fixed, unalterable.

If, through the long day, the starved heart of the man called feebly
for its natural food, he called it a paltry weakness; or if the old
thought of the quiet, pure little girl in the office below came back to
him, he--he wished her well, he hoped she might succeed in her work, he
would always be ready to lend her a helping hand. So many years (he
was ashamed to think how many) he had built the thought of this girl as
his wife into the future, put his soul's strength into the hope, as if
love and the homely duties of husband and father were what life was
given for! A boyish fancy, he thought. He had not learned then that
all dreams must yield to self-reverence and self-growth. As for taking
up this life of poverty and soul-starvation for the sake of a little
love, it would be an ignoble martyrdom, the sacrific