man whom I love, and who professes to love me, to bestow myself on
another, and to plead for him to a younger and fairer bride. Well, I
will obey him in the first; the last is a bitterer task, and I cannot
perform it earnestly. Yet Vargrave has a strange power over me; and when
I look round the world, I see that he is right. In these most
commonplace artifices, there is yet a wild majesty that charms and
fascinates me. It is something to rule the world: and his and mine are
natures formed to do so."



CHAPTER IX.

A SMOKE raised with the fume of sighs.

_Romeo and Juliet_.

IT is certain that Evelyn experienced for Maltravers sentiments which, if
not love, might easily be mistaken for it. But whether it were that
master-passion, or merely its fanciful resemblance,--love in early youth
and innocent natures, if of sudden growth, is long before it makes itself
apparent. Evelyn had been prepared to feel an interest in her solitary
neighbour. His mind, as developed in his works, had half-formed her own.
Her childish adventure with the stranger had never been forgotten. Her
present knowledge of Maltravers was an union of dangerous and often
opposite associations,--the Ideal and the Real.

Love, in its first dim and imperfect shape, is but imagination
concentrated on one object. It is a genius of the heart, resembling that
of the intellect; it appeals to, it stirs up, it evokes, the sentiments