not as the lover alone. In the lover she beheld the good angel. Had he
only died to her, still the angel smile would have survived and warned.
But the man had not died; the angel itself had deceived; the wings could
uphold her no more,--they had touched the mire, and were sullied with the
soil; with the stain, was forfeited the strength. All was deceit and
hollowness and treachery. Lone again in the universe rose the eternal I.
So down into the abyss she looked, depth upon depth, and the darkness had
no relief, and the deep had no end.

Olivier Dalibard alone, of all she knew, was admitted to her seclusion.
He played his part as might be expected from the singular patience and
penetration which belonged to the genius of his character. He forbore
the most distant allusion to his attachment or his hopes. He evinced
sympathy rather by imitating her silence, than attempts to console. When
he spoke, he sought to interest her mind more than to heal directly the
deep wounds of her heart. There is always, to the afflicted, a certain
charm in the depth and bitterness of eloquent misanthropy. And Dalibard,
who professed not to be a man-hater, but a world-scorner, had powers of
language and of reasoning commensurate with his astute intellect and his
profound research. His society became not only a relief, it grew almost
a want, to that stern sorrower. But whether alarmed or not by the
influence she felt him gradually acquiring, or whether, through some
haughty desire to rise once more aloft from the state of her rival and
her lover, she made one sudden effort to grasp at the rank from which she
had been hurled. The only living person whose connection could re-open
to her the great world, with its splendours and its scope to ambition,
was Charles Vernon. She scarcely admitted to her own mind the idea that
she would now accept, if offered, the suit she had before despised; she
did not even contemplate the renewal of that suit,--though there was
something in the gallant and disinterested character of Vernon which