d. She still had her books, she still had a great love in
her heart, and hope, almost now a sure hope, that her love would blossom
into a great happiness.

But where was Philip? In all this time why did he make no sign?
At moments a great fear came over her. She was so ignorant of life.
Could he know what misery she was in, the daily witness of her father's
broken condition, of her mother's uncertain temper?

XXVI

Is justice done in this world only by a succession of injustices?
Is there any law that a wrong must right a wrong? Did it rebuke the
means by which the vast fortune of Henderson was accumulated, that it was
defeated of any good use by the fraud of his wife? Was her action
punished by the same unscrupulous tactics of the Street that originally
made the fortune? And Ault? Would a stronger pirate arise in time to
despoil him, and so act as the Nemesis of all violation of the law of
honest relations between men?

The comfort is, in all this struggle of the evil powers, masked as
justice, that the Almighty Ruler of the world does not forget his own,
and shows them a smiling face in the midst of disaster. There is no
mystery in this. For the noble part in man cannot be touched in its
integrity by such vulgar disasters as we are considering. In those days
when Evelyn saw dissolving about her the material splendors of her old
life, while the Golden House was being dismantled, and she was taking sad
leave of the scenes of her girlhood, so vivid with memory of affection
and of intellectual activity, they seemed only the shell, the casting-off
of which gave her freedom. The sun never shone brighter, there was never
such singing in her heart, as on the morning when she was free to go to
Mrs. Van Cortlandt's and throw herself into the arms of her dear
governess and talk of Philip.

Why not? Perhaps she had not that kind of maidenly shyness, sometimes
called conventional propriety, sometimes described as 'mauvaise honte'
which a woman of the world would have shown. The impulses of her heart
followed as direct lines as the reasoning of her brain. Was it due to
her peculiar education, education only in the noblest ideas of the race,
that she should be a sort of reversion, in our complicated life, to the
type of woman in the old societies (we like to believe there was such a
type as the poets love, the Nausicaas), who were single-minded, as frank
to avow affection as opinion?

"Have you seen him?" she asked.