the mood of the moment, but always with an effort, was in itself a confession of failure. She was unfit for the society of his equals; and he, was not he unfit for hers? None of these things had Nancy said to herself, but they were all surging within, pushing her on by their very tumult and unrest to ever more and more entire committal of herself to this foolish and wrong way. Nobody knew better than she how foolish it was and wrong; but the more the conviction grew, the more ungovernable was her determination to be stopped by no one, to yield to no one, to assert herself as everybody’s equal or superior, claiming in her own right all the consideration that a princess could command. She had never put these feelings into words, passionate and vehement though they were, nor had she anyone in the world to whom she could confide them. Poor girl! the conflict in her mind had often been beyond utterance; but she had clung desperately all through to that most variable and poorest of supports her personal pride. And this had driven her into all manner of follies, as has been seen, and into this culminating folly at last. She lay sleepless all the night through, and wept, thinking of Arthur. It would be better for him. No more would that anxious look come over his face, the look which had driven her wild and made her ruder and more self-assertive than ever, that anxiety as to her behaviour and her appearance which made her tingle with the consciousness that she was still Nancy Bates, and would still be judged as such, whatever might happen. He would not be troubled with Nancy Bates now. He would go back untrammeled among his fine friends, where nobody made mistakes in dress, and where everybody knew as their A B C those things which were mysteries to her. He would be free; Nancy jumped up in her bed clenching her hands, her eyes heavy, her head hot, her brain almost mad with passion--he would be free! and she left here to be sneered at, and smiled at, and pointed at--a wife, a woman who had been forsaken. Then this furious sense of humiliation would melt, and burst forth into a sense of something better which she had concealed, which no one had ever known. She had been a failure; but who would love him so well as she did among all the fine people he might meet with? who would think of him so much? She, thinking of him, had brought little happiness to Arthur; her love had been as a fire which scorched and charred rather than one which warmed and gladdened--but still, if anything happened to him, if trouble came in his way, who would be faithful like his wife, faithful to death, ready to confront every danger for him; but that he would never know. The convulsions of feeling which she thus went through fortunately made Nancy ill. For a day or two she was feverish, and kept her bed, where she was waited on with sedulous care by her mother and sisters. They had never failed in kindness or affection, but they were now more anxious, more concerned