thoughts! She had lived the life
of unblemished respectability for a year, and looking back now at the
Bohemian wanderings, she regretted those days of humiliation and
misery, and sighed for the rare delights of that disreputable past!
Yes, she had revolted against the degraded existence; and now she was
sorry for having lost its uncertain pleasures, its fitful glimpses of
sunshine. Was that true which Valentine had said, that no man can eat
beef and mutton every day of his life; that it is better to be
unutterly miserable one day and uproariously happy the next, than to
tread one level path of dull content? Miss Paget began to think that
there had been some reason in her old comrade's philosophy; for she
found the level path very dreary. She let her thoughts wander whither
they would in this quiet holiday idleness, and they went back to the
years which she had spent with her father. She thought of winter
evenings in London when Valentine had taken her the round of the
theatres, and they had sat together in stifling upper boxes,--she
pleased, he critical, and with so much to say to each other in the
pauses of the performance. How kind he had been to her; how good, how
brotherly! And then the pleasant walk home, through crowded noisy
thoroughfares, and anon by long lines of quiet streets, in which they
used to look up at the lighted windows of houses where parties were
being given, and sometimes stop to listen to the music and watch the
figures of the dancers flitting across the blinds. She thought of the
journeys she had travelled with her father and Valentine by land and
sea; the lonely moonlight watches on the decks of steamers; the long
chill nights in railway-carriages under the feeble glimmer of an
oil-lamp, and how she and Valentine had beguiled the tedious hours with
wild purposeless talk while Captain Paget slept. She remembered the
strange cities which she and her father's _protege_ had looked at side
by side; he with a calm listlessness of manner, which might either be
real or assumed, but which never varied; she with an inward tremor of
excitement and surprise. They had been very happy together, this lonely
unprotected girl and the reckless adventurer. If his manner to her had
been fitful, it had been sometimes dangerously, fatally kind. She
looked back now, and remembered the days which she had spent with him,
and knew that all the pleasures possible in a prosperous and successful
life could never bring for