"Don't talk of what you do not understand. She is too selfish to love anything or anybody but herself. Mark me, whether I live to see it or not, if he marries her, he will despise her in less than six months, and curse himself for his blind folly. Oh, what a precious farce it will prove!" She laughed sneeringly. "Cornelia, you are not able to bear this excitement. For the present, let Eugene and his future rest and try to compose yourself. You are so nervous you can scarcely sit still." The colorless face, with its gleaming eyes, was suddenly lifted; and, throwing her arms round Beulah's neck, Cornelia rested her proud head on the orphan's shoulder. "Be my friend while I live. Oh, give me some of your calm contentment, some of your strength!" "I am your friend, Cornelia; I will always be such; but every soul must be sufficient for itself. Do not look to me; lean upon your own nature; it will suffice for all its needs." With the young teacher, pity was almost synonymous with contempt; and, as she looked at the joyless face of her companion, she could not avoid thinking her miserably weak. CHAPTER XXII. Christmas Day was sunny and beautiful. The bending sky was as deeply blue as that which hung over Bethlehem eighteen hundred years before; God's coloring had not faded. Happy children prattled as joyously as did the little Jew boys who clustered curiously about the manger to gaze upon the holy babe, the sleeping Jesus. Human nature had not altered one whit beneath the iron wheel of Time. Is there a man so sunk in infamy or steeped in misanthropy that he has not, at some period of his life, exclaimed, in view of earth's fadeless beauty: "'This world is very lovely. O my God! I thank Thee that I live.'"