more easy and simple, more possible, to fill that fancy with an image that had no actual embodiment, and to call to her side the being who was nothing more than a recollection, whose very name and everything about him was unknown to her. She accepted him as a symbol of all that a dreaming girl desires in a companion. He was a dream; there need be no bounds to the enthusiasm, the poetry, the fine imagination, with which she endowed him, any more than there need be to the devotion to herself, which was a mere dream also. He might woo her as men only woo in the imagination of girls, so delicately, so tenderly, with such ethereal worship. How different the most glorious road would be were he beside her! though in reality he was beside her all the way, saying things which were finer than anything but fancy, breathing the very soul of rapture into her being. The others knew nothing of all this; how should they? And Mrs. Lennox, for one, sometimes asked herself whether Rosalind was really enjoying her travels. “She says so little,” that great authority said. There was, however, little danger that she should forget one, at least, of her actual lovers. In the meantime a great deal had been going on in the world, and especially in that distant part of it to which Rivers had gone. The little war which he had gone to report had turned into a most exciting and alarming one; and there had been days in which the whole world, so to speak--all England at least, and her dependencies--had hung upon his utterance, and looked for his communications every morning almost before they looked at those which came from their nearest and dearest. And it was said that he had excelled himself in these communications. He had done things which were heroic, if not to hasten the conclusion of the war, to make it successful, yet at least to convey the earliest intelligence of any new action, and to make people at home feel as if they were present upon the very field, spectators of all the movements there.