"My dearest Nan," said he, gently, "it is the very thing I did!" She looked at him with blank, unseeing eyes. "What do you mean, papa?" "I actually offered him that very opening, with every prospect of partnership that single partner could hold out." "When?" asked Nan after a further pause. Her voice had changed. "The first time I saw him after the wreck. It was too late. He had heard of the diggings, and he would hear of nothing else." "Why did you never tell me before?" "My dear child, need you ask? I thought it would hurt you," said Mr. Merridew; and the tender compassion in his voice was not unmingled with remorse, for Nan had turned very pale, and her lip quivered. "It does," she said, simply. "No doubt that was why he did not tell me either," she added, and the quivering lip curled. In a minute she crossed over to her father's chair and kissed him without emotion. "I am afraid I have been very rude, besides misjudging you so strangely. But--but don't let us misjudge anybody else until we must--or speak of him again until we hear." But it was harder now to believe the best, harder yet to look back without a passionate shame and indignation which in their intensity surpassed all that the girl had yet endured. She came down paler and paler in the mornings. It was because she had lain such a fiery red half the night--in the ti-tree thicket of her waking nightmare. She could not know how her feelings had been foreseen, nay, endured from the first on her behalf. She only knew that never in the morning was there the letter for which she looked--and almost loathed herself for looking--nor yet ever toward evening, when the postman came again, and Nan watched for him, openly or in hiding as pride or passion might prevail. All this time, but now more than ever, the girl filled her life with a resolution which declared her calibre. She regained touch with her friends throughout the countryside. She visited the villagers, managed her father's house with increased capability, and no longer discouraged him from entertaining, as her inclination had been for a time. People who stayed in the house found its young mistress brighter in a way than they had ever known her. But that was the form of hospitality Nan relished least. As spring advanced she was more and more out of doors, on horseback or afoot; but in the open air she still preferred to be alone, and would advertise the fact by carrying a book on all her walks. She had taken to reading as she had never read before, in a way at once desultory and omnivorous. And it was in a tome from her father's shelves, to wit Southey's "Early British Poets," that a sudden beam of comfort and enlightenment shot into her soul from the immortal lines of Lovelace to Lucasta:-- "Yet this inconstancy is such, As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov'd I not honour more."