It was out in a garden on a summer’s night, “and music and moonlight and feeling were one,” and, as Kate Singleton sat in the shadow of a tree, the tears rolled down her cheek, and I am sure that a sympathetic wooer might then have struck the vein of true womanliness in her with all the old softness, all the old lovableness of girlhood. But the melting mood was brief, for soon afterwards, in the gaslight of the drawing room, there were no traces of tears on her face, no gentle signs in her voice of a recent “session of sweet silent thought.” She was busily challenging to flirtation a man whom she had artfully taken from the side of a pretty young girl to whom his words were as honey. It was a petty episode quite unworthy of her, for at best the conquest would be but for an evening, while it would cause the young girl a real heart-pang. But this was one of the atoms of excitement that make her life tolerable to her; her dominant desire is to make men feel the pangs of unreturned love, or, failing that, her pleasure is to flirt with them up to a point and then to turn round and snub them. This affords her amusement as well as vent for bitterness of feeling. Some unmarried women can soothe their solitary souls with charity of act and feeling, and bless other people’s lives with their benevolence, thus directing the love and sympathy that one man has missed into the wider channel of philanthropy. But these, possibly, have never been crossed in love, or, if they have, they are the women of whom the silent, uncomplaining martyrs of the world are made. Miss Singleton, however, is none of these. She cannot forgive, especially as she finds it impossible to forget.