e essayed to show
feeling, but she had little to show. It was not her fault. Do you blame
the dahlia for not having the fragrance of a tuberose? It is the most
dangerous quality of enthusiastic young men and women that they are able
to deceive themselves. Nine tenths of all conjugal disappointments come
from the ability of people in love to see more in those they love than
ever existed there. That love is blind is a fable. He has an affection of
the eyes, but it is not blindness. Nobody else ever sees so much as he
does. For here was Albert Charlton, bound by his vows to Helen Minorkey,
with whom he had nothing in common, except in intellect, and already his
sorrow was disclosing to him the shallowness of her nature, and the depth
of his own; even now he found that she had no voice with which to answer
his hungry cry for sympathy. Already his betrothal was becoming a fetter,
and his great mistake was disclosing itself to him. The rude suspicion
had knocked at his door before, but he had been able to bar it out. Now
it stared at him in the night, and he could not rid himself of it. But he
was still far enough from accepting the fact that the intellectual Helen
Minorkey was destitute of all unselfish feeling. For Charlton was still
in love with her. When one has fixed heart and hope and thought on a
single person, love does not die with the first consciousness of
disappointment. Love can subsist a long time on old associations.
Besides, Miss Minorkey was not aggressively or obtrusively selfish--she
never interfered with anybody else. But there is a cool-blooded
indifference that can be moved by no consideration outside the Universal
Ego. That was Helen.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE MYSTERY.

I have before me, as one of the original sources of information for this
history, a file of _The Wheat County Weakly Windmill_ for 1856. It is not
a large sheet, but certainly it is a very curious one. In its day this
_Windmill_ ground many grists, though its editorial columns were chiefly
occupied with impartial gushing and expansive articles on the charms of
scenery, fertility of soil, superiority of railroad prospects,
admirableness of location, healthfulness, and general future rosiness of
the various paper towns that paid tribute to its advertising columns. And
the advertising columns! They abounded in business announcements of men
who had "Money to Loan on Good Real Estate" at three, four, five, and six
per cent a month, and o