Edward was moved in a very different way. He would have been magnanimous and given up Cara--that is, having no real right to Cara, he might have given up the youthful imagination of her which had always been his favourite fancy, to his brother, with some wringing of the heart, but with that compensation which youth has in the sublime sense of self-sacrifice. But there is no bitterness greater in this world, either for young or old, than that of giving up painfully to another something which that other holds with levity and treats with indifference. To hear Cara, the sacred young princess of his own fancy, spoken of lightly, and the supreme moment of possible union with her characterised as ‘turning off,’ was a downfall which made Edward half-frantic with pain and shame, and indignation and impatience. She would be to Oswald only a commonplace little wife, to be petted when he was in the humour, standing very much lower than himself in his own good graces; whereas, to Edward she would have been----! but it was Oswald, not Edward, whom she had chosen. How strange they are! all those wonderful confusions of humanity which depress the wisest, the blind jumps at fate, the foolish choices, the passing over of the best to take the worst, which form the ordinary course of existence everywhere, the poor young fellow thought, in this first encounter with adverse events; and this was mingled with that strange wonder of the tender heart to find itself uncomprehended and rejected, while gifts much less precious than those it offers are accepted, which is one of the most poignant pangs of nature:--and these feelings surging dimly through Edward’s mind, filled him with a despondency and pain beyond words. Indeed, he could not have told all the bitterness of the vague heavy blackness which swallowed up the fair world and everything lovely before him. It was not only that Cara had (he thought) chosen Oswald instead of himself, but also that the lesser love was preferred to the greater, and that the thing one man would have worshipped was thrown to the careless keeping of another, as if it were a thing of no price. The personal question and the abstract one twisted and twined into one, as is general in the first trials of youth. He himself unconsciously became to himself the symbol of true love misjudged, of gold thrown away for pinchbeck--and Cara the symbol of that terrible perennial mistake which is always going on from chapter to chapter of the world’s history. Even, for he was generous in the very pangs of that visionary envy, it added another pang of suffering to Edward’s mind, that he could not but consider his brother as the pinchbeck, so far as Cara at least was considered. While Oswald sat smiling to himself through the fumes of his cigar, Edward threw his window open and gazed out into the chill darkness of the winter night, feeling the cold wind, which made him shiver, to be more in consonance