possible to Mariana. A few months of domestic life she still was almost
happy. But Sylvain then grew tired. He wanted business and the world;
of these she had no knowledge, for them no faculties. He wanted in her
the head of his house; she to make her heart his home. No compromise was
possible between natures of such unequal poise, and which had met only
on one or two points. Through all its stages she

"felt
The agonizing sense
Of seeing lore from passion melt
Into indifference;
The fearful shame that, day by day,
Burns onward, still to burn,
To have thrown her precious heart away,
And met this black return,"

till death at last closed the scene. Not that she died of one downright
blow on the heart. That is not the way such cases proceed. I cannot
detail all the symptoms, for I was not there to watch them, and aunt Z.
was neither so faithful an observer or narrator as I have shown myself
in the school-day passages; but, generally, they were as follows.

Sylvain wanted to go into the world, or let it into his house. Mariana
consented; but, with an unsatisfied heart, and no lightness of
character, she played her part ill there. The sort of talent and
facility she had displayed in early days, were not the least like what
is called out in the social world by the desire to please and to shine.
Her excitement had been muse-like, that of the improvisatrice, whose
kindling fancy seeks to create an atmosphere round it, and makes the
chain through which to set free its electric sparks. That had been a