Now I have to confess that many years before this I had formed my own plans for Alice--had quite made up my mind, indeed, to a secret scheme of match-making in which at the moment I had been grievously disappointed. At that time, when little Derwie was undreampt of, and I had prematurely made up my mind to a childless life, I had settled my inheritance of Estcourt upon my young cousin Bertie Nugent, with a strong hope that the boy, who had known her for so many years, would naturally prefer my pretty Alice to all strangers, when his good fortune and affectionate heart put marriage into his head. This did not turn out the case, however. Bertie made his choice otherwise, was disappointed, and went off to India, where for eight long years he had remained. Sometimes, when he wrote to me, I found a message of good wishes to his old playmates at the very end of the page; once or twice it had occurred to him to ask, “Is not Alice Harley married?” but the question seemed to proceed rather from surprise and curiosity than any tender interest. It is impossible to imagine a greater separation than there was between these two. Bertie, now Captain Herbert Nugent, at a remote station in the Bengal Presidency, where, scattered over that vast, arid country, he had friends, brothers, and cousins by the dozen; and Alice, with her new-fangled notions, and staid single-woman dignity, hid away in the depths of a quiet English home, where she addressed herself to her duty and the education of her little sisters and eschewed society. Whether any secret thoughts of each other lingered in their minds nobody of course could tell; but they certainly had not, except in my persistent thoughts, a single bond of external connection. So long as they were both unmarried, I could not help putting them together with an imagination which longed for the power of giving efficacy to its dreams; but nobody else had ever done so--there were thousands of miles of land and water dividing them--many long years, and most likely a world of dissimilar dispositions, experiences and thoughts.