al. She had made conquests so easily, she had found men so much
alike, and in her secret heart she despised them for being so ready to
kneel and bow at beauty's shrine. It seemed to her as if youth and
fortune were alike boundless; and she literally took no thought for the
morrow, until the tidings of her father's death was followed by the
subsequent news of loss of fortune.

If George Eastman had a self-conviction that he and his cousin had
contributed to this downfall, he tried to make it up to Irene in
brotherly kindness and generous expenditure where money was concerned.
He solaced himself with the thought that, after all, he had no more than
his own, or what should have been his own rightfully, though he fancied
he could not have gone on to the end quite as Horace had.

When Sir Christopher Frodsham came across the two ladies in Paris,
Gertrude exulted at the easy conquest. A man of fifty, whose young years
and health had been spent in sowing a plentiful crop of wild oats, but
to whom had come now, quite unexpectedly, a fortune and a title; and
prosperity, after years of rather bitter economy, made him miserly, as
it not unfrequently does such men. That he would have been glad to marry
this young, beautiful girl, for himself alone, was most true. And Irene,
in the bewilderment of the losses, inclined to his proposal, and begged
time for consideration.

He was not a man she could admire, respect, or love. He was narrow,
egotistical, selfish, and with the pitiful vanity of a worn-out _roue_.
Frodsham Park was in a lonely, mountainous part of England, bordering on
Wales; and this man would look upon his wife as a nurse and companion,
and the mother of an heir.

There must have been a little strain of heroism in the girl. Suddenly,
in one of those quick, vivid flashes, like mental lightning, she saw
that she could not do this thing. She was not at all given to analysis;
she had never dissected her own soul, or that of her neighbors; but she
arrived at one of those swift, clear verdicts,--she could not marry Sir
Christopher; and she told him so, with a frankness a trifle tenderer,
perhaps, than she had used with her lovers heretofore, as if some way
she had wronged him in thought.

Over this, as I said, she and Gertrude had bitter words and a parting.
Now the same thing stared her in the face again. This lover was too
obtuse to be stung by the fine arts of coquetry that lengthened practice
had brought to perfection