Sometimes, after reading some very noble or beautiful poem, some very striking and powerful novel, she had, it is true, wondered a little if life was ever to contain any romance for her, and had thought that such a romance would be pleasant. Then, being well endowed with a certain shrewd, homely, common sense, she had often observed her own reflection in the looking-glass, and had said to herself, ‘Nita, my child, don’t flatter yourself that any man will ever fall in love with you for your beauty; and if he should tell you he does, don’t believe him. He might like you for some of your other qualities, if he ever took the trouble to find them out, and no doubt many persons might be found to love your money, and take you with it as a necessary appendage; but I think you would do best to keep heart-whole, and not marry anyone at all.’ She had been very contented in this prospect, though it must be owned she had never contemplated the future without placing in it the figure of John Leyburn in the character of ‘guide, philosopher, and friend.’ Then her father had appeared one afternoon, with Jerome Wellfield at his side, and from that hour Nita’s fixed and settled plans for life were upset. That she should have cast aside her crude, untried schemes and fancies when the man appeared whom she loved, in spite of all efforts not to love him, was perhaps not surprising; indeed, there was perhaps nothing very surprising in the whole matter. But, in every deep, intense, and powerful love there are tragic elements, and those elements were present in this love of Nita’s. Not the least tragic one was, that though, as time went on, Wellfield said many tender things to her, and looked unutterable ones; though she loved him as her life, and would have hailed as a foretaste of heaven the conviction that he loved her, yet she never had that conviction. She did not feel that he loved her; she only felt that the things which she had seen she now could see no more, that her peace and repose of mind were gone, and that thus it must be, until he or she were no more. She felt that she was living in an unnatural manner—in a dream; that the equilibrium between outward and inward things had received a shock. She knew, though she would not have put it in those words, that, sooner or later, that equilibrium must be readjusted—that something would come to restore it, that the restoration might take many shapes. There was the equilibrium which means happiness, the continuous adjustment of outer to inner conditions; there was the imperfect adjustment of those conditions, which meant more or less of sorrow and suffering; there is the final equilibrium—that great adjustment of outward conditions to inward ones, which we call death. Any of these things might come to her she vaguely felt as she paced beside the river walk, with Speedwell beside her, and saw the swirling eddies of the river, and heard its gurgle, and saw the