whom his taste and fancy worshipped, and many another votary of the
gentil Dieu, while his imagination devoted itself to the chaste and
distant ideal--the spiritual Laura--his senses, ever vagrant and
disengaged, settled without scruple upon the thousand Cynthias of the
minute. But then those Cynthias were, for the most part, and
especially of late years, easy and light-won nymphs; their coyest were
of another clay from the tender but lofty Sibyll. And Hastings shrunk
from the cold-blooded and deliberate seduction of one so pure, while
he could not reconcile his mind to contemplate marriage with a girl
who could give nothing to his ambition; and yet it was not in this
last reluctance only his ambition that startled and recoiled. In that
strange tyranny over his whole soul which Katherine Bonville secretly
exercised, he did not dare to place a new barrier evermore between her
and himself. The Lord Bonville was of infirm health; he had been more
than once near to death's door; and Hastings, in every succeeding
fancy that beguiled his path, recalled the thrill of his heart when it
had whispered "Katherine, the loved of thy youth, may yet be thine!"
And then that Katherine rose before him, not as she now swept the
earth, with haughty step and frigid eye and disdainful lip, but as--in
all her bloom of maiden beauty, before the temper was soured or the
pride aroused--she had met him in the summer twilight, by the
trysting-tree, broken with him the golden ring of faith, and wept upon
his bosom.

And yet, during his brief and self-inflicted absence from Sibyll, this
wayward and singular personage, who was never weak but to women, and
ever weak to them, felt that she had made herself far dearer to him
than he had at first supposed it possible. He missed that face, ever,
till the last interview, so confiding in the unconsciously betrayed
affection. He felt how superior in sweetness and yet in intellect