For a time the artist seemed rather "distrait" also, as if a memory were troubling him. He often looked around when any one entered, and his eyes at times rested on Ida's vacant chair. But he soon passed under the spell of Jennie Burton's genial talk, which seemingly glowed with the sunshine that had enveloped her during her quest of the roses, and the poor girl, who was fairly quivering with pain because of his significant act and words on the piazza, was forgotten. She knew she was forgotten. The hum of voices, the cheerful clatter from the lighted supper-room, came up to her darkening apartment, and only increased her sense of loneliness and isolation. Her quick ear caught Van Berg's mellow laugh, evoked by one of Miss Burton's sallies. It is a dreary sensation to find one's self wholly forgotten by mere acquaintances; but to find that we have no place in the thoughts of those we love, seems in a certain sense like being annihilated. But for poor Ida was reserved a deeper suffering still, since she believed that the man she loved did not dismiss her from his mind indifferently, but rather with aversion and disgust. She felt her isolation terribly. To whom could she turn in her trouble? The thought of her father was both a reproach and a humiliation. He was drifting hopelessly, and almost unresistingly, towards final wreck, and, so far from seeking to restrain, she had added to the evil impetus. She shrank from the very idea of confiding in her garrulous, superficial mother. She felt that her cousin detested as well as despised her. The flattered girl, who a little before thought the world was at her feet, now felt friendless and alone, scarcely tolerated by her own family, and scorned by others. Of course she exaggerated the evil of her lot. The young an inexperienced are ever prone to look, for the time, on the earlier misfortunes of their lives as irretrievable. In after years they may smile at their causeless despair; but the world is full of tragedies that to the wise and sober minded had slight cause. Ida's troubles, however, were scarcely slight, and she, above all others, was the least fitted to bear trouble and thwarting. To be refused anything would be a new and disagreeable experience, but to be denied that which her heart craved supremely, tended to call out all the passionate recklessness of her ungoverned, undisciplined nature. The child from whom something is taken, will often cast away in anger all that is offered in its place; and in like hasty folly many a man and woman, to their eternal regret, have thrown away life itself. Suicide is often the product of passion as well as of despair; the irritable, headlong protest against evils that might have been and should have been remedied.