“Are they worth the humiliation?” she thought sometimes, when she contemplated her diamonds before the lighted glass in her bedroom at Brighton. “They are very big and brilliant and costly; but I’ve seen myself look handsomer with a scrap of scarlet ribbon twisted in my hair, than I look to-night with all these stars and crosses and serpents flashing and twinkling about me. And then, when I go down stairs, I must go through all the old stereotyped business; and when I thank him for the flowers that he sent me this morning, he will look at me with his cold eyes, and tell me he is pleased to have given me pleasure. What is he but a clod--a mere clod, nothing but a clod? I ought to remember that; and yet I am angry with him because he does not love me. Why can I not be thankful for my good fortune, and accept my future husband for what he is,--a respectable, well-behaved ploughman, whom an accident has endowed with thirty thousand a year?” Perhaps Miss Desmond did not particularly care to answer that question which she put to herself in so impatient a spirit. And yet it was a question that might have been answered, had she cared to fathom the lower deeps of her own mind. But then there _are_ questions which are better left unanswered. Why was she angry with Francis Tredethlyn for that passionless serenity of manner which was so nearly akin to indifference? Why? unless it was because in her own heart there lurked the consciousness that the unpolished Cornishman _might_ have been a very different kind of lover; and that beneath his cold exterior there were slumbering embers which might have blazed into glory had one special torch been applied to them. Yes, Julia knew this, and the knowledge was a perpetual poison that embittered the wine of success. The pride of the Desmonds had not been entirely trodden out beneath the iron heel of poverty. This girl, who had not been too proud to set herself to ensnare a rich husband, was yet proud enough to feel the bitterness of her degradation. “If he only loved me,” she thought, “I should feel that the bargain was a fair one. But to know that, at best, he only submits to the force of circumstances! He has been drifted into the position of a lover, and he performs the duties exacted of him; just like some non-dancing man who has been persuaded to dance in order to fill the last place in a quadrille, and who dawdles listlessly through the figures, and almost yawns in the face of his partner. And yet I have seen him look at _her_ until the dull clay of which he is made seemed to change into a thing of life and fire.” And then Miss Desmond was fain to turn to her new jewel-case for consolation, and to beguile her mind from unpleasant thoughts by the consideration of all those grand things that may be done with thirty thousand a year.