Daphne gave herself up wholly to the delight of the hour. She had been unusually cheerful and equable in her temper since New Year’s Day. That parental blessing, freely and ungrudgingly given, seemed to have sweetened her whole nature. She went to church with Madoline, and prayed with all her heart and soul, and listened without impatience to a string of seasonable platitudes, culled from the elder divines, and pronounced in a humdrum style of elocution by the Reverend Marmaduke Ferrers. She had been altogether blameless in her bearing and her conduct in this new-fledged year: so much so that Mrs. Ferrers had deigned to concede, with chilly patronage, that Daphne was beginning to become a reasonable being. She had been fighting her inward battle honestly and bravely. She had avoided as much as possible that society which was so poisonously sweet to her. She had been less exacting to her devoted slave, Edgar. She had given more time to improving studies. She had taken up Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and practised them industriously, breathing, ah! too much soul into the pathetic passages, dwelling too fondly on the deep ground-swell of melody, which carries a passionate heart along on its fierce tide, and, in its fervid feeling and exaltation of spirit, is akin to the actual triumph of a happy love. Unconscious of the danger, and resolutely bent on curing herself of a futile foolish attachment, she yet fed her passion with the fatal food of poetry and music, finding in every heroine she most admired, from Juliet to Enid, a love as inevitably doomed to misery as her own. But all the while she was earnest in her desire to forget. ‘If my namesake, in the pride of her purity, could fly from a god who adored her, surely it cannot be hard for me to harden my heart against a man who does not care a straw for me,’ she told herself scornfully.