Alarm seized upon Effie, and dismay. She had been frightened before at the setting up of a new life which she felt no wish for, no impulse to embrace; but she had not thought how different was the life of Allonby from that of Gilston, and her modest notions of rustic gentility from the luxury and show to which the rich man’s son had been accustomed. Doris and Phyllis and their ways of thought, and their habits of existence, came before her in a moment as part of the strange shifting panorama which encompassed her about. How was she to get to think as they did, to accustom herself to their ways of living? She had wondered and smiled, and in her heart unconsciously criticised these ways: but that was Fred’s way as well as theirs. And how was she with her country prejudices, her Scotch education, her limitations, her different standard, how was she to fit into it? But with Ronald she would have dwelt among her own people--oh, the different life! Oh, the things that might have been! Poor Ronald went his way sadly from the same meeting with a consciousness that was sharp and confusing and terrible. After the first miserable shock of disappointment which he had felt on hearing of Effie’s engagement, he had conversed much with himself. He had said to himself that she was little more than a child when he had set his boyish heart upon her, that since then a long time had passed, momentous years: that he had changed in many ways, and that she too must have changed--that the mere fact of her engagement must have made a great difference--that she had bound herself to another kind of existence, not anything he knew, and that it was not possible that the betrothed of another man could be any longer the little Effie of his dreams. But he had looked at her, and he had felt that he was mistaken. She was his Effie, not that other man’s: there was nothing changed in her, only perfected and made more sweet. Very few were the words that passed between them--few looks even, for they were afraid to look at each other--but even that unnatural reluctance said more than words. He it was who was her mate, not the stranger, the Englishman, the millionaire, whose ways and the ways of his people were not as her ways. And yet it was too late! He could neither say anything nor do anything to show to Effie that she had made a mistake, that it was he, Ronald, whom Heaven had intended for her. The young man, we may be sure, saw nothing ludicrous in this conviction that was in his mind; but he could not plead it. He went home to the old-fashioned homely house, which he said to himself no wife of his should ever make bright, in which he would settle down, no doubt, like his old uncle, and grow into an old misanthrope, a crotchety original, as his predecessor had done. Poor old uncle David! what was it that had made him so? perhaps a fatal mistake, occurring somehow by no fault of his--perhaps a little Effie, thrown away upon a stranger, too--