his
maze of the intellect. That fair youth of inexperience and candour which
seemed to bloom out in the face of her betrothed; his very shrinking
from the schemes so natural to her that to her they seemed even
innocent; his apparent reliance on mere masculine ability, with the
plain aids of perseverance and honesty,--all had an attraction that
plucked her back from herself. If she clung to him firmly, blindly,
credulously, it was not as the lover alone. In the lover she beheld the
good angel. Had he only died to her, still the angel smile would have
survived and warned. But the man had not died; the angel itself had
deceived; the wings could uphold her no more,--they had touched the
mire, and were sullied with the soil; with the stain, was forfeited the
strength. All was deceit and hollowness and treachery. Lone again in the
universe rose the eternal I. So down into the abyss she looked, depth
upon depth, and the darkness had no relief, and the deep had no end.

Olivier Dalibard alone, of all she knew, was admitted to her seclusion.
He played his part as might be expected from the singular patience and
penetration which belonged to the genius of his character. He forbore
the most distant allusion to his attachment or his hopes. He evinced
sympathy rather by imitating her silence, than attempts to console. When
he spoke, he sought to interest her mind more than to heal directly the
deep wounds of her heart. There is always, to the afflicted, a certain
charm in the depth and bitterness of eloquent misanthropy. And Dalibard,
who professed not to be a man-hater, but a world-scorner, had powers of
language and of reasoning commensurate with his astute intellect and his
profound research. His society became not only a relief, it grew almost
a want, to that stern sorrower. But whether alarmed or not by the
influence she felt him gradually acquiring, or whether, through some
haughty desire to rise once more aloft from the state of her rival and
her lover, she made one sudden effort to grasp at the rank from which
she had been hurled. The only living person whose connection could
re-open to her the great world, with its splendours and its scope to
ambition, was Charles Vernon. She scarcely admitted to her own mind
the idea that she would now accept, if offered, the suit she had before
despised; she did not even contemplate the renewal of that suit,--though
there was something in the gallant and disinterested character of
Vernon