white teeth. The nose belonged to the inferior order of pug or snub; the
forehead was low and broad, with dark-brown hair rippling over it--hair
which seemed always wanting to escape from its neat arrangement into a
multitude of mutinous curls. She was altogether a young person whom the
admirers of the soubrette style of beauty might have found very charming;
and, secluded as her life at the Grange had been, she had already more
than one admirer.

She used to relate her love affairs to Marian Holbrook in the quiet
summer evenings, as the two sat under an old cedar in the meadow nearest
the house--a meadow which had been a lawn in the days when the Grange was
in the occupation of great folks; and was divided from a broad
terrace-walk at the back of the house by a dry grass-grown moat, with
steep sloping banks, upon which there was a wealth of primroses and
violets in the early spring. Ellen Carley told Mrs. Holbrook of her
admirers, and received sage advice from that experienced young matron,
who by-and-by confessed to her humble companion the error of her own
girlhood, and how she had jilted the most devoted and generous lover that
ever a woman could boast of.

For some months--for the bright honeymoon period of her wedded
life--Marian had been completely happy in that out-of-the-world region.
It is not to be supposed that she had done so great a wrong to Gilbert
Fenton except under the influence of a great love, or the dominion of a
nature powerful enough to subjugate her own. Both these influences had
been at work. Too late she had discovered that she had never really loved
Gilbert Fenton; that the calm grateful liking which she had told herself
must needs be the sole version of the grand passion whereof her nature
was capable, had been only the tamest, most ordinary kind of friendship
after all, and that in the depths of her soul there was a capacity for an