these labours and drudgeries, Nettie had gone on her triumphant way, wearing her bonds as if they were ornaments. Suddenly, without any premonition, the heart had died out of her existence. A personal blow, striking with subtle force into that unseen centre of courage and hope, had suddenly disabled Nettie. She said not a word on the subject to any living creature--if she shed any tears over it, they were dropped in the darkness, and left no witness behind; but she silently recognised and understood what had happened to her. It was not that she had lost her lover--it was not that the romance of youth had glimmered and disappeared from before her eyes. It was not that she had ever entered, even in thought, as Edward Rider had done, into that life, glorified out of common existence, which the two could have lived together. Such was not the form which this extraordinary loss took to Nettie. It was her personal happiness, wonderful wine of life, which had suddenly failed to the brave little girl. Ah, the difference it made! Labours, disgusts, endurances of all kinds: what cannot one undertake so long as one has that cordial at one's heart? When the endurance and the labour remain, and the cordial is gone, it is a changed world into which the surprised soul enters. This was what had happened to Nettie. Nobody suspected the sudden change which had passed upon everything. The only individual in the world who could have divined it, had persuaded himself in a flush of anger and mortification that she did not care. He consoled himself by elaborate avoidance of that road which led past St Roque's--by bows of elaborate politeness when he encountered her anywhere in the streets of Carlingford--by taking a sudden plunge into such society as was open to him in the town, and devoting himself to Miss Marjoribanks, the old physician's daughter. Nettie was not moved by these demonstrations, which showed her sway still undiminished over the doctor's angry and jealous heart. She did not regard the petulant shows of pretended indifference by which a more experienced young woman might have consoled herself. She had enough to do, now that the unsuspected stimulus of her life was withdrawn for the moment, to go on steadily without making any outward show of it. She had come to the first real trial of her strength and worthiness. And Nettie did not know what a piece of heroism she was enacting, nor that the hardest lesson of youthful life--how to go on stoutly without the happiness which that absolute essence of existence demands and will not be refused--was being taught her now. She only knew it was dull work just for the moment--a tedious sort of routine, which one was glad to think could not last for ever; and so went on, the steadfast little soul, no one being any the wiser, upon that suddenly-clouded, laborious way.