to have no love, and was to be spent without him.

How was she to bear it? She had known no other hope in life, no other
dream. What had been childish nonsense to him had been to her a serious
and exquisite reality. He had either forgotten it, or had thought of it
only with annoyance; she had made it the very corner-stone of her life.

It was not only a blow of the keenest and cruelest kind to her
affections, but it was the cruelest blow her vanity could have possibly
received. To think that she, who had more admirers at her feet than any
other woman in London, should have tried so hard to win this one, and
have failed--that her beauty, her grace, her wit, her talent, should all
have been lavished in vain.

Why did she fail so completely? Why had she not won his love? It was
given to no other--at least she had the consolation of knowing that. He
had talked about his ideal, but he had not found it; he had his own
ideal of womanhood, but he had not met with it.

"Are other women fairer, more lovable than I am?" she asked herself.
"Why should another win where I have failed?"

So through the long hours of the starlit night she lamented the love and
the wreck of her life, she mourned for the hope that could never live
again, while her name was on the lips of men who praised her as the
queen of beauty, and fair women envied her as one who had but to will
and to win.

She would have given her whole fortune to win his love--not once, but a
hundred times over.