d an answer
to the letter she had written to Christopher informing the latter that
she believed she had at last discovered George Farringdon's son.

Amidst all her sorrow at the anticipation of giving up her kingdom into
the hands of so unfitting a ruler as Cecil, there lurked a pleasurable
consciousness that at last Christopher would recognise her worth, when
he found how inferior her successor was to herself. It was strange how
this desire to compel the regard which she had voluntarily forfeited,
had haunted Elisabeth for so many years. Christopher had offended her
past all pardon, she said to herself; nevertheless it annoyed her to
feel that the friendship, which she had taken from him for punitive
purposes, was but a secondary consideration in his eyes after all. She
had long ago succeeded in convincing herself that the grapes of his
affection were too sour to be worth fretting after; but she still wanted
to make him admire her in spite of himself, and to realize that Miss
Elisabeth Farringdon of the Osierfield was a more important personage
than he had considered her to be. Half the pleasure of her success as an
artist had lain in the thought that this at last would convince
Christopher of her right to be admired and obeyed; but she was never
sure that it had actually done so. Through all her triumphal progress he
had been the Mordecai at her gates. She did not often see him, it is
true; but when she did, she was acutely conscious that his attitude
toward her was different from the attitude of the rest of the world, and
that--instead of offering her unlimited praise and adulation--he saw her
weaknesses as clearly now she was a great lady as he had done when she
was a little girl.

And herein Elisabeth's intuition was not at fault; her failings were
actually more patent to Christopher than to the world at large. But here
her perception ended; and she did not see, further, that it was because
Christopher had formed such a high ideal of her, that he minded so much
when she fell short of it. She had not yet grasped the truth that
whereas the more a woman loves a man the easier she finds it to forgive
his faults, the more a man loves a woman the harder he finds it to
overlook her shortcomings. A woman merely requires the man she loves to
be true to her; while a man demands that the woman he loves shall be
true to herself--or, rather, to that ideal of her which in his own mind
he has set up and worshipped.

Her consci