"She has something on her mind," thought Sydney, "something she is uncertain about telling us," for the girl had no great opinion of Mrs Dalrymple's power of reserve, and every time that their hostess introduced a new subject of conversation Sydney trembled, she hardly knew why, and glanced furtively in her sister's direction. Eugenia sat quietly, unconscious of anything unusual in Mrs Dalrymple's demeanour, now and then putting in a remark on one or other of the various topics touched upon. She was at that stage of very youthful suffering at which a sort of calm often falls upon the inexperienced subject of it; in reality a simple physical reaction, but which she told herself, with a childish yet morbid satisfaction, must be "the apathy of despair." Her life, she told herself, was over; she had sounded the very depths of suffering, she had experienced the worst, the very worst; only one possible aggravation of what she had endured was conceivable to her; yet not so either, for her heart refused to listen to the faintest suggestion of so monstrous an idea as that of her having been deceived in her hero. Could it be possible that he had never been "in earnest," that he did not really care for her, that the softly hinting words and looks more eloquent than words had meant nothing? Oh no, no, it could not be; though all the world should swear it to her, she would refuse to believe it. "For if I ever came to think so, I should die," she said to herself, with the innocent arrogance of youth which cannot believe that ever a human being's sufferings equalled its own, or that the worst anguish is not that which kills, but that which is lived through. For in those natures which have the deepest capacity for suffering there is usually an appalling reserve of strength and endurance, and to such, dying is not so easy of achievement, as, fresh from their baptism of woe, they are apt to imagine. And Eugenia did not yet know either that there is a "living," compared to which this ignorantly invoked "dying,"--a girl's hazy, sentimental notion of it, that is to say--were but child's play.