Yes, things certainly looked brighter next morning, but the brightness was somewhat fitful and tremulous. Encouraged by it, nevertheless, Eugenia made many new resolutions--too many perhaps--and cherished again new hopes. She set herself with palpitating earnestness to please her husband, and repeated to herself, whenever she had reason to think she had done so, that her former failures had been entirely attributable to her own bad management, want of tact, or exaggerated sensitiveness. Her desire to bring herself, and not Captain Chancellor, in guilty; her determination to see him, and everything about him, by the light of her former hopes and beliefs would have been piteous to any one well acquainted with both characters. She was fighting, not merely for happiness, but for faith--her terror, fast maturing, though as yet resolutely ignored, was not so much that her married life should prove a disappointment as that she should be forced into acknowledging the unworthiness of her idol--that the day should come when, in unutterable bitterness of spirit, she should be driven to confess, "behold it was a dream;" when, the glamour gone for ever, the prize she had won should be seen by her for but "a poor thing" after all. For should that day ever come, Eugenia, little as she knew herself, yet felt instinctively it would go sorely with her--ever prone to extremes, her judgment would then be warped by disappointment, as formerly by unreasonable expectation. "If I ever come to believe Beauchamp selfish, small-minded, or in any sense less noble than my ideal husband," she had once said to herself, "I cannot imagine that I could endure to remain with him--I cannot imagine that I could live. Only," she added, and this reflection many a time stood her in good stead, giving her a sense of security--of firm ground in one direction, "there is one thing I can _never_ be disappointed in--the certainty of his love. Even should it die out altogether--should he live to regret his marriage, and think it a mistake, I shall know that it _was_ mine--that to win me he threw every other consideration aside."