ng from some wound or other injury which has shattered for the
time his nervous power, will, when he begins to walk slowly about the
streets, start and shudder if he sees someone moving rapidly in his
direction, because he is seized with an instinctive and horrible dread
that the rapid walker is sure to come into collision with him. Helena
Langley felt somewhat like that. Her nerves were shaken; her framework
of joyous self-forgetfulness was wholly shattered; she was conscious and
nervous all over--in every sudden word or movement she feared an attack
upon her nerves. What would it matter to the world--the world of
London--even if the world had known all? Two ladies would meet and say,
'Oh, my dear, do you know, that pretty and odd girl Helena Langley--Sir
Rupert's daughter--has fallen over head and ears in love with the
Dictator, as they call him--that man who has come back from some South
American place! Isn't it ridiculous?--and they say he doesn't care one
little bit about her.' 'Well, I don't know--he might do a great deal
worse--she's a very clever girl, _I_ think, and she will have lots of
money.' 'Yes, if her father chooses to give it to her; but I'm told she
hasn't a single sixpence of her own, and Sir Rupert mightn't quite like
the idea of her taking up with a beggarly foreign exile from South
America, or South Africa, or wherever it is.' 'But, my dear, the man
isn't a foreigner--he is an Englishman, and a very attractive man too. I
think _I_ should be very much taken by him if I were a girl.' 'Well, you
surprise me. I am told he is old enough to be her father.' 'Oh, good
gracious, no; a man of about forty, I should think; just the right age
of man for a girl to marry; and really there are so _few_ marrying men
in these days that even girls with rich fathers can't always be
choosers, don't you know?'

Now, the way in which these two ladies might have talked about Helena's
secret, if they could have discovered it, is a fair illustration of the
vapid kind of interest which society in general would have taken in the
whole story. But it did not seem thus to Helena. To her it appeared as
if the whole world would have cried scorn upon her if it had found out
that she fell in love with a man who had given her no reason to believe
that he had fallen in love with her. Outside her own closest friends,
society would not have cared twopence either way. Society is interested
in the marriages of girls who belong to its set--