matters, we are rarely so sympathetic with fulfilment as with
disappointment. The pretty Miss Blake was a disappointed woman after she
had secured Mr. Elmsdale. She then understood that the best life could
offer her was something very different indeed from the ideal duke her
beauty should have won, and she did not take much trouble to conceal her
dissatisfaction with the arrangements of Providence.

Mr. Craven, seeing what Mr. Elmsdale was towards men, pitied her.
Perhaps, had he seen what Mrs. Elmsdale was towards her husband, he
might have pitied him; but, then, he did not see, for women are
wonderful dissemblers.

There was Elmsdale, bluff in manner, short in person, red in the face,
cumbersome in figure, addicted to naughty words, not nice about driving
fearfully hard bargains, a man whom men hated, not undeservedly; and
yet, nevertheless, a man capable of loving a woman with all the veins of
his heart, and who might, had any woman been found to love him, have
compassed earthly salvation.

There were those who said he never could compass eternal; but they
chanced to be his debtors--and, after all, that question lay between
himself and God. The other lay between himself and his wife, and it must
be confessed, except so far as his passionate, disinterested love for an
utterly selfish woman tended to redeem and humanise his nature, she
never helped him one step along the better path.

But, then, the world could not know this, and Mr. Craven, of whom I am
speaking at the moment, was likely, naturally, to think Mr. Elmsdale all
in the wrong.