much of the old trust and affection that it
took all the day to stamp out the fragrance of tenderness which her
dreams had left behind. But after a time these dreams and memories grew
fewer and less distinct, and she persuaded herself that Christopher had
never been the true and devoted friend she had once imagined him to be,
but that the kind and affectionate Chris of olden days had been merely a
creature of her own invention. There was no one to plead his cause for
him, as he was far away, and appearances were on the side of his
accuser; so he was tried in the court of Elisabeth's merciless young
judgment, and sentenced to life-long banishment from the circle of her
interests and affections. She forgot how he had comforted her in the day
of her adversity. If he had allowed her to comfort him, she would have
remembered it forever; but he had not; and in this world men must be
prepared to take the consequences of their own mistakes, even though
those mistakes be made through excess of devotion to another person.

In certain cases it may be necessary to pluck out the right eye and cut
off the right hand; but there is no foundation for supposing that the
operation will be any the less painful because of the righteous motive
inducing it. And so Christopher Thornley learned by bitter experience,
when, after many days, he returned from a fruitless search for the
missing heir, to find the countenance of Elisabeth utterly changed
toward him. She was quite civil to him--quite polite; she never
attempted to argue or quarrel with him as she had done in the old days,
and she listened patiently to all the details of his doings in
Australia; but with gracious coldness she quietly put him outside the
orbit of her life, and showed him plainly that he was now nothing more
to her than her trustee and the general manager of her works.

It was hard on Christopher--cruelly hard; yet he had no alternative but
to accept the position which Elisabeth, in the blindness of her heart,
assigned to him. Sometimes he felt the burden of his lot was almost more
than he could bear; not because of its heaviness, as he was a brave man
and a patient one, but because of the utter absence of any joy in his
life. Men and women can endure much sorrow if they have much joy as
well; it is when sorrow comes and there is no love to lighten it, that
the Hand of God lies heavy upon them; and It lay heavy upon
Christopher's soul just then. Sometimes, when he felt w