Catherine Hilliard had drifted away from her friends on the misty, dreary sea of illness which had no shore, till she seemed lost to them here, till even to Oliver Constable—who now owned to himself, like the _Bursch_ in the famous _Burschenlied_, that he had loved her always and would love her throughout eternity—she survived chiefly as the aching, melancholy thought of the girl who had been capable of dreaming noble things, but who had not been able to grasp the truth that behind the commonest, even the most sordid, absolutely repulsive details of human life, there exist nobler things still than man or woman ever dreamt of in their highest philosophy. And the brute creation, which Catherine Hilliard had so loved, preferring it to the human, drew dumbly and wistfully away from the decline of her humanity; while the book world in which she had elected to dwell, crumbled into dust around her. She had left books too behind her, and the beings that peopled her present existence were more visionary than the ghosts she had formerly chosen for her company. Oliver could only look forward to her deliverance from this last bondage to the unreal, by her entrance on unsealed and everlasting verities. Then it was when Oliver was most tempted to regard his enterprise as a wretched disappointment, he was called on to take up the burden of another man’s failure. CHAPTER XXVI. THE PRICE AT WHICH HARRY STANHOPE WAS RESCUED. The first thing to be done for Harry Stanhope was to get him out of the situation for which he was utterly unfit, into which he had thrust himself—to extricate him from the network of idleness, false activity, unsuitable companionship, debt, and dissipation in which he was entangled. In some respects the feat was not only practicable, it was comparatively easy. Harry had proved himself so thoroughly incapable a farmer, that it was not likely any sane landlord would be urgent to keep this tenant, particularly as his slender funds and a part of his wife’s portion were already flung to the winds, or rather sunk in the soil, and he had no more left to deposit in the land even if that had been his sole mode of spending money. Old Peter Constable had believed in women’s power of standing alone, and had left Fan absolutely mistress of her portion. Oliver had braved her indignation by asking her to have it settled on herself before her marriage. And certainly Harry Stanhope had not opposed the arrangement, for Harry was truly convinced of the treasure Fan was in herself, as well as habitually careless of pounds, shillings, and pence. Therefore, though he talked the jargon of his set—to Horace and others, and professed, as a claim to being a man of the world, not to be indifferent to tin—to the degree of counting on a woman’s goods to eke out his resources, he did not really put much weight on Fan’s bank-book and coupons, or mind whether she kept them in her own hands or put them into his.