Good Clementina--what did she mean? Did she imagine that such mere gifts as she might give him, could do more for him than the great sea, with the torment and conquest of its winds and tempests? more than his own ministrations of love, and victories over passion and pride? What the final touches of the shark-skin are to the marble that stands lord of the flaming bow, that only can wealth and position be to the man who has yielded neither to the judgments of the world nor the drawing of his own inclinations, and so has submitted himself to the chisel and mallet of his maker. Society is the barber who trims a man’s hair, often very badly too--and pretends he made it grow. If her owner should take her, body and soul, and make of her being a gift to his--ah, then, indeed! But Clementina was not yet capable of perceiving that, while what she had in her thought to offer _might_ hurt him, it _could_ do him little good. Her feeling concerning him, however, was all the time far indeed from folly. Not for a moment did she imagine him in love with her. Possibly she admired him too much to attribute to him such an intolerable and insolent presumption as that would have appeared to her own inferior self. Still, she was far indeed from certain, were she, as befits the woman so immeasurably beyond even the aspiration of the man, to make him offer implicit of hand and havings, that he would reach out his to take them. And certainly that she was not going to do--in which determination, whether she knew it or not, there was as much modesty and gracious doubt of her own worth as there was pride and maidenly recoil. In one resolve she was confident, that her behaviour towards him should be such as to keep him just where he was, affording him no smallest excuse for taking one step nearer: and they would soon be in London, where she would see nothing, or next to nothing more of him. But should she ever cease to thank God, that was, if ever she came to find him, that in this groom he had shown her what he could do in the way of making a man! Heartily she wished she knew a nobleman or two like him. In the meantime she meant to enjoy--with carefulness --the ride to London, after which things should be as before.