diamond without its flaw? What rose without its canker? And bedded
deep in that exquisite and charming nature lay the dangerous and fatal
weakness which has cursed so many victims, broken so many hearts,--the
vanity of the sex. We may now readily conceive how little predisposed
was Sibyll to the blunt advances and displeasing warnings of the Lady
Bonville, and the more so from the time in which they chanced. For
here comes the answer to the question, "Why was Sibyll sad?"

The reader may determine for himself what were the ruling motives of
Lord Hastings in the court he paid to Sibyll. Whether to pique the
Lady Bonville, and force upon her the jealous pain he restlessly
sought to inflict; whether, from the habit of his careless life,
seeking the pleasure of the moment, with little forethought of the
future, and reconciling itself to much cruelty, by that profound
contempt for human beings, man, and still more for woman, which sad
experience often brings to acute intellect; or whether, from the purer
and holier complacency with which one whose youth has fed upon nobler
aspirations than manhood cares to pursue, suns itself back to
something of its earlier lustre in the presence and the converse of a
young bright soul,--whatever, in brief, the earlier motives of
gallantries to Sibyll, once begun, constantly renewed, by degrees
wilder and warmer and guiltier emotions roused up in the universal and
all-conquering lover the vice of his softer nature. When calm and
unimpassioned, his conscience had said to him, "Thou shalt spare that
flower." But when once the passion was roused within him, the purity
of the flower was forgotten in the breath of its voluptuous sweetness.

And but three days before the scene we have described with Katherine,
Sibyll's fabric of hope fell to the dust. For Hastings spoke for the
first time of love, for the first time knelt at her feet, for the