awry. He looked at her searchingly; and as he looked the mere man in him
asserted itself for a moment. She was dressed in coarse garments; it
struck him that her grief had a touch of commonness about it; there was
something imperfect in the dramatic setting. His recent experiences had
had a kind of grandeur about them; it was not thus that he had remembered
her in the hour when he had called upon her in the plains, and the Indian
had heard his cry. He felt, and was ashamed in feeling, that there was
a grim humour in the situation. The fantastic, the melodramatic, the
emotional, were huddled here in too marked a prominence; it all seemed,
for an instant, like the tale of a woman's first novel. But immediately
again there was roused in him the latent force of loyalty to himself and
therefore to her; the story of her past, so far as he knew it, flashed
before him, and his eyes grew hot.

He remembered the time he had last seen her in an English country-house
among a gay party in which royalty smiled, and the subject was content
beneath the smile. But there was one rebellious subject, and her name
was Hester Orval. She was a wilful girl who had lived life selfishly
within the lines of that decorous yet pleasant convention to which she
was born. She was beautiful,--she knew that, and royalty had graciously
admitted it. She was warm-thoughted, and possessed the fatal strain of
the artistic temperament. She was not sure that she had a heart; and
many others, not of her sex, after varying and enthusiastic study of the
matter, were not more confident than she. But it had come at last that
she had listened with pensive pleasure to Trafford's tale of love; and
because to be worshipped by a man high in all men's, and in most women's,
esteem, ministered delicately to her sweet egotism, and because she was
proud of him, she gave him her hand in promise, and her cheek in
privilege, but denied him--though he knew this not--her heart and the
service of her life. But he was content to wait patiently for that