accusing their hearts of feeling too deeply her attractions, or, as they
themselves suspected, for the first time, that a heart was not a word for
a poetical nothing, and that to look on so beautiful and glorious a
creature was sufficient to convince them, even yet, of the possibility of
emotion. She had felt to the quick the condescending patronage of
duchesses and chaperons; the oblique hint; the nice and fine distinction
which, in polished circles, divides each grade from the other, and allows
you to be galled without the pleasure of feeling justified in offence.

All this, which, in the flush and heyday of youth, and gaiety, and
loveliness, would have been unnoticed by other women, rankled deep in the
mind of Constance Vernon. The image of her dying father, his complaints,
his accusations (the justice of which she never for an instant
questioned), rose up before her in the brightest hours of the dance and
the revel. She was not one of those women whose meek and gentle nature
would fly what wounds them: Constance had resolved to conquer. Despising
glitter and gaiety, and show, she burned, she thirsted for power--a power
which could retaliate the insults she fancied she had received, and should
turn condescension into homage. This object, which every casual word,
every heedless glance from another, fixed deeper and deeper in her heart,
took a sort of sanctity from the associations with which she linked
it--her father's memory and his dying breath.

At this moment in which we have portrayed her, all these restless, and
sore, and haughty feelings were busy within; but they were combated, even
while the more fiercely aroused, by one soft and tender thought--the image
of Godolphin--of Godolphin, the spendthrift heir of a broken fortune and a
fallen house. She felt too deeply that she loved him; and, ignorant of
his worldlier qualities, imagined that he loved her with all the devotion
of that romance, and the ardour of that genius, which appeared to her to