‘You are to be in all our amusements, and to hear all our plans, dear,’ she told her sister one day. ‘I never meant that you and I should be less together, or less dear to each other, because of Gerald’s return. Do you think my heart is not big enough to hold you both?’ ‘I know it is, Lina. But I fancy Mr. Goring would like to have it all to himself, and would soon get to look upon me as an intruder, if I were too much with you. You had better leave me at home to amuse myself on the river, or to play ball with Goldie, who is more than a person as to sense and sensibility.’ To this Madoline would not consent. Her love of her sister was so tempered with pity, so chastened and softened by her knowledge of the shadow that darkened the beginning of Daphne’s life, that it was much deeper and stronger than the affection common among sisters. She wanted to make up to Daphne for all she had lost; for the cruel mother who had deserted her in her cradle; for the father’s unjust resentment. And then there was the delightful idea that Edgar Turchill, that second best of men, whom she had rejected as a husband, would by-and-by be her brother; and that Daphne’s future, sheltered and cherished by a good man’s devoted love, would be as complete and perfect a life as the fairest and sweetest of women need desire to live. Madoline had quite made up her mind that Edgar was to marry Daphne. That he was passionately in love with her was obvious to the meanest capacity. Everybody at South Hill knew it except perhaps Daphne herself. That she liked him with placid sisterly regard was equally clear. And who could doubt that time would ripen this sisterly regard into that warmer feeling which could alone recompense him for his devotion? Thus, against the girl’s own better sense, it became an understood fact that Daphne was to be a third in all the lovers’ amusements and occupations, and that Mr. Turchill was very frequently to make a fourth in the same. To Gerald Goring the presence of these two seemed in no wise obnoxious. Daphne’s vivacity amused him, and he looked upon his old friend Turchill as a considerably inferior order of being, not altogether unamusing after his kind. He was not an exacting lover. He accepted his bliss as a settled thing; he knew that no rock on Cornwall’s rugged coast was more securely based than his hold on Madoline’s affection. He was troubled by no jealous doubts; his love knew no hot fits or cold fits, no quarrelling for the after bliss of reconciliation. There was nothing of the _grata protervitas_ in Madoline’s gentle nature. Her well-balanced mind could not have stooped to coquetry.