This clever, handsome, resolute man had, as I afterwards found, resolved, in the first period of our acquaintance, on making me his wife--you will wonder why,--since there was little love on his part, and my poor heart was bleeding from a sense of wrong at the hands of one I had loved. But I began to be ashamed of my girlish passion, verily not without reason. Nevertheless, youth receives such impressions readily, fake though they be, and afterwards the heart shudders at the bare remembrance of what it suffered in its bewilderment of a first passion; the experience taught by such a sorrow is very bitter, and can never be forgotten. I cannot bear to detail the artful schemes by which this man persuaded my father at first to listen to his proposals for me; but, on my assurance that I loved him not, Lyle was forbidden to press his suit farther, at any rate for a time. Thus he was not dismissed finally; he declared himself grievously mortified, and, obtaining leave of absence during a lull in the political storms that had threatened to desolate the country, departed on a sporting expedition. He returned in three months laden with the spoils of the chase, and designated the White _Somtsen_, or, in the Kafir language, a mighty hunter. He again renewed his suit. Woe is me! I could see that my father and my mother were not agreed in this matter; the latter openly reproached me for my weakness in adhering to my first love--she appealed to my pride. Alas, alas! my friend, I own that I had been wanting in that--I admitted my error, and deplored it. She spoke of the family reputation being sullied by the union of my name with that of Clarence Fairfax and the miserable Mrs Rashleigh. I could not see it in the light she did, but I wept sorely when she alluded to the mortification it had caused her _and my father_; she emphasised the last two words of this sentence. She dwelt on a difference of opinion now existing between her and my father--"it might estrange them seriously." I trembled, and began to waver in my resolution. She said that the _esclandre_ had been injurious to my sister's prospects in life. I feared that I had been more to blame than I had believed. I said "the world was very hard." "Very," replied my mother--"so hard, that your imprudence has been visited on all of us. I have been blamed for launching you into the gaieties of life at Cape Town, with all its incidental temptations. Marion is pointed out as the sister of `that flirt, Miss Daveney, Mrs Rashleigh's rival;' and your father reproaches himself for not remaining with you when he discovered that Lady Amabel Fairfax had lost rather than gained in strength of character--"