coins--of which men like Mr. Ascott had such profusion--would bring
them together; and, let trials be many or poverty hard, give them the
unutterable joy of being once more face to face and heart to
heart--oh, it was sore, sore!

Yet when she went up from the parlor, where the newly-affianced
couple sat together, "making-believe" a passion that did not exist,
and acting out the sham courtship, proper for the gentleman to pay
and the lady to receive--when she shut her bedroom door, and there,
sitting in the cold, read again and again Robert Lyon's letter to
Johanna, so good, so honest; so sad, yet so bravely enduring--Hilary
was comforted. She felt that true love, in its most unsatisfied
longings, its most cruel delays, nay, even its sharpest agonies of
hopeless separation, is sweeter ten thousand times than the most
"respectable" of loveless marriages such as this.

So, at the week's end, Hilary went patiently to her work at
Kensington, and Selina began the preparations for her wedding.



CHAPTER XV.

In relating so much about her mistresses, I have lately seemed to
overlook Elizabeth Hand.

She was a person easy enough to be overlooked. She never put herself
forward, not even now, when Miss Hilary's absence caused the weight
of housekeeping and domestic management to fall chiefly upon her. She
went about her duties as soberly and silently as she had done in her