determination. Since her hero was disinherited and poor, and she, though
rich, would be poor in all she cared to have if she were parted from him,
might she not tell him so when she saw him on her birthday? She thought it
would be easier to speak on the one day when in girlish fashion she would
be queen. She would not think of her own pride, because his pride was dear
to her. She could not tell what she would say or do: she only knew that her
birthday should decide her fate. And her heart was beating fast in hope
and fear the night before when she banged the door after her and went off
to bed, sublimely ready to renounce the world for Percival.




CHAPTER III.

DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES--ALFRED THORNE'S IS TOLD BY THE WRITER.


Mr. Thorne of Brackenhill was a miserable man, who went through the world
with a morbidly sensitive spot in his nature. A touch on it was torture,
and unfortunately the circumstances of his daily life continually chafed
it.

It was only a common form of selfishness carried to excess. "I don't want
much," he would have said--truly enough, for Godfrey Thorne had never been
grasping--"but let it be my own." He could not enjoy anything unless he
knew that he might waste it if he liked. The highest good, fettered by any
condition, was in his eyes no good at all. Brackenhill was dear to him
because he could leave it to whom he would. He was seventy-six, and had
spent his life in improving his estate, but he prized nothing about it so