gid and brilliant and
remote. I daresay, despite all her beauty and her talent and even with
her wealth thrown in, she will have comparatively few lovers, yet those
few will be truer to her through all her coldness and her disfavor than
the lovers of many a sweeter girl. Did I say Phebe was one in a thousand?
Well Miss Vernor is one in nine hundred and ninety-nine,--or one in ten
thousand,--I don't know which."

"You said Phebe was the better worth loving of the two," said Mrs.
Whittridge, coming to walk up and down the room with him and clasping
her hands over his arm. "I used to think,--I fancied you cared for the
child,--that you would care for her."

Denham stood still and faced his sister very gravely, "I was growing to
care for her, Soeur Angelique," he said. "I believe I would have loved
her if,--if Gerald Vernor had not come here when she did."

"Oh, Denham!"

"Yes, Soeur Angelique. It is a humiliating confession, is it not, that
one has wilfully thrown away something that perhaps one might have had,
for something that one knows one can never have? It is sheerest folly.
And to do it with one's eyes open is the maddest folly of all. Gerald
Vernor is as indifferent to me as it is possible for one human creature
to be to another. I hold no more place in her thoughts than had I never
existed. And yet, Soeur Angelique, I am fool enough,--or helpless
enough,--whichever you please, to love her. I love her not for what she
is to me, but for what she is in herself, for what she really is, rather
than for what she seems,--for the strength and the heroism of her heart,
which I see through all the glaring, commonplace faults, which she is at
no pains to hide. Or perhaps I only love her because it was meant that I
should. Be it as it may, I do love her, and as passionately, as entirely,
and as hopelessly as it is possible for man to love."

"O Denham, Denham, my boy!"

Denham laid his hand lightly on his sister's lips. "Now we have had a
sufficiency of heroics for once, indeed for always," he said, with a
wholly altered voice. "Life has enough of solemnity in it and in spare,
without our adding aught to it. We will not speak of this again, if you
please. Folly is always best forgotten. But Soeur Angelique, if you
imagine me to be a blighted being, if you think I walk the floor in the
dead of night, tearing my hair and calling on all the stars to witness
the unearthly gloom in my racked bosom, you are utterly mistaken.