To swerve from truth or change her constant mind. --Milton. And now Lotte Clinton was again alone in the world---again with her face confronting her situation, prepared to sustain her cross with the meek fortitude she had always hitherto displayed. She had nourished in secret her hope that one day she should meet with some sound-hearted singleminded youth, who would love her for herself, and whom she should love, and heartily too, for the selfsame qualification. It was only the natural promptings of a young girl’s heart; it would, indeed, have been unnatural for her not to have entertained some such notion. She had met the man who had gained her heart--her first love, her soul’s idolatry. He was not the man she had pictured. She had never sketched out such a figure, such a face as Mark possessed. She had never, indeed, created a model. She had hoped only for a manly loving heart, and Mark presented himself, carrying off her affection by a _coup de main_, without any of those considerations she had deemed essential to love being consulted in the matter. Oh, she loved him truly, dearly, faithfully, and with the most pure unselfishness. No greater happiness could she conceive than being his wife. Yet to her clear mind there were duties superior to her deep affection, and she bent to them. She swerved not from them, even though her heart broke in the task. The night that Mark went away she prayed for his happiness with earnest sincerity, and though she might never, never see him more, and her future life be thus made sad and cheerless, she sent up an entreaty that their separation might never sit heavy on his heart. A week had passed away. She was pale, and a dull settled expression had fastened itself upon her once lively, intelligent open face. She had not seen her brother Charley since Mark’s departure, and her only solace had been Helen Grahame’s child. She had hitherto loved it--now she doated upon it. It seemed all that she had left to love, and to love her; for that the child was most fondly attached to her there could be no doubt. She had had him christened by the name of Hugh Riversdale Grahame, and she had stood as godmother to him, resolving to fulfill firmly, faithfully, and justly that sacred responsibility in the absence of his own mother, of whom, since the night she left her so strangely, she had nothing heard.