It was the old story—he had loved and ridden away; and, for many months after his defection, I had sincerely believed my grief to be incurable. I was very young and innocent at that period, and credited my darling mother with cold-heartedness when she told me that a woman might love more than once in a lifetime, and better the second time than the first. I had been reared close to her side, and knew nothing of the wickedness of the world nor the elasticity of the human heart. I was one of those girls who believe that it is impossible for a married woman to flirt, or an engaged woman to break her word, without being branded with public scorn; and a great deal of my grief for Cave Charteris’s desertion was due to the humiliating idea that my neighbours had observed his attentions, and considered me degraded by the loss of them. This sort of unworldly ignorance did not long continue. I was not stupid, and as my girlhood merged into womanhood, my eyes became opened to the depravity of the human race; and I learned to despise Cave Charteris instead of myself, and to see that he had been utterly unworthy of the affection and admiration I had lavished upon him. Yet the romance of my first disappointment continued to haunt and vex me, long after common sense had bid me rejoice at the escape I had had from marrying a man who was false as well as fickle. It may be remembered how difficult a task I found it to tell the history of my heart to poor dear Charlie Sandilands, when he came to see me at Norwood, on the day after my mother’s funeral. It was the false sentiment that still hung about Cave Charteris’s hair and eyes and voice, that made the task so difficult. I would not have taken the man back to my affections at that moment, if he had crawled to my feet to sue for forgiveness, because I knew him to have been utterly heartless with regard to me—yet I could have cried over a letter from him, or a lock of his hair, or an old glove that he had worn, simply because they reminded me of the faith which I had cherished and lost. Women and men are very different in this respect. Where a man’s trust has been betrayed, he becomes hard and bitter, and thrusts from him, as far as possible, everything likely to bring the loss which he has sustained to his mind again. A woman may be as disinclined to pardon as himself—as determined never again to be deceived, but she cannot give up, all at once, every little tender memory that made her dead life so much brighter than her living one. She takes the ring off her finger—the hair from her locket—but she does not throw them away. They are like the dead to her. They have no more part in her existence, but they are sacred, and she covers them up with tears and prayers, as we strew rue and rosemary upon our corpses.