forward with increasing eagerness to the heaven of German fashionable
life, wherein she, rich, admired, allied by marriage to some powerful
noble family, should shine a queen in the world of art.

"I have joined her aspirations to mine," he said, in self-gratulation.
"I have blended our ambitions and sources of hope and enjoyment, and
that is better than all her promises."

When Dennis saw first the face that was so beautiful and yet so marred
by pride and selfishness, Christine was about nineteen years old, and
yet as mature in some respects as a woman of thirty. She had the perfect
self-possession that familiarity with the best society gives. Mr.
Ludolph was now too shrewd to seek safety in seclusion. He went with
his daughter into the highest circles of the city, and Christine had
crowds of admirers and many offers. All this she enjoyed, but took it
coolly as her right, with the air of a Greek goddess accepting the
incense that rose in her temple. She was too proud and refined to flirt
in the ordinary sense of the word, and no one could complain that she
gave much encouragement. But this state of things was all the more
stimulating, and each one believed, with confidence in his peculiar
attractions, that he might succeed where all others had failed. Miss
Ludolph's admirers were unaware that they had a rival in some as yet
unknown German nobleman. At last it passed into a proverb that the
beautiful and brilliant girl who was so free and courtly in society
was as cold and unsusceptible as one of her father's statues.

Thus it would seem that when circumstances brought the threads of these
two lives near each other, Dennis's and Christine's, the most impassable
barriers rose between them, and that the threads could never be woven
together, or the lives blended. She was the daughter of the wealthy,