This, however, is an incursion into the future which we are scarcely warranted in making, seeing that the fate of the two principal persons of this history still remains unsettled. Fanshawe lingered at St. Andrews through all the Winter and Spring. He made himself of use to everybody, and was deeply ashamed of his own absolute uselessness. Never had he been so conscious of the good-for-nothing existence which he did not seem able to shake himself clear of. It closed his mouth in Marjory’s presence. What could he say for himself? how could he recommend himself to her? He would go and sit by her, or walk by her side when permitted, silent, embarrassed; doing nothing to win her attention, wondering if she despised him, or if she pitied him, or if she thought him worth thinking of at all? His feelings grew exaggerated and unreal in the profound consciousness he had of his own helpless unimportance, and in his constant surmises as to what she thought of him, and the questions concerning him which must arise in her mind. One half of these questions, however, never arose in Marjory’s mind at all, and the other half appeared to her in a different light, and affected her differently; but the man was in love and humble, and never divined this. He lingered on, hoping for he knew not what; that something might break the ice between them, that she might offer herself to him, or something else equally improbable. Marjory’s sentiments were of a very different character. She did not feel herself to stand on that vast pinnacle of superiority which was so visible to him; her eyes were not so clear as he supposed them. To be sure, he was not at all her ideal of what a man ought to be; but I am not sure that she liked him less on that account. Probably Marjory, like many other young women, supposed herself to prefer that glorious being of romance whom romantic girls dream of, whom they can look up to, upon whom they can hang in sweet but abject inferiority, and who is to them, as Mr. Trollope says, a god. I say probably she supposed that she would have liked this; but I doubt much whether she would have liked it; for men like gods seldom appear to the visual organs of any but very susceptible feminine adorers, after five-and-twenty, and Marjory had reached that ripe age. But I fear she liked Fanshawe all the better for not being a god. She liked him for the very qualities which he felt she must despise him for. To her the vague and unsettled character of his life appeared but dimly, while his generosities shone out very bright. All her good sense and discrimination failed her in this point, as such qualities invariably do just at the moment when they might be of practical use. In matters so closely concerning personal happiness they never are of the slightest use; as soon as the heart is touched, such poor bulwarks of the mind yield as if they were made of broken reeds. She saw nothing ignoble, nothing unworthy in the life full of so many kindly uses, of which