All the happiness was gone out of her life, all the sweet tranquillity which had been the holiest charm in her love for Bothwell, the deep faith in her beloved, the assurance of his trustworthiness, his unalloyed love for her. How could she ever again believe in that love, after she had heard the history of his passion for another, after she had read of that wild infatuation in his own hand, after she had seen the woman he had thus loved and thus addressed--a woman to win and hold the love of men, a woman whose face had that subtle charm of supreme refinement and distinction which is far above the peach-bloom tints and perfect lines of stereotyped beauty? In Valeria the broken-hearted girl acknowledged a siren before whose fascinations the wisest man might be as a fool. She compared herself with her rival. She walked across the room and stood before the long console-glass, contemplating her own image, half-scornfully, half-sorrowfully. The pale tear-blotted face appeared at its worst, robbed of the freshness that constituted half its beauty. The slight and girlish figure looked insignificant as compared with Valeria's statelier bearing. The girl turned herself about, and looked at herself at every angle, as if she had been trying on a gown at her milliner's. "What a dowdy I am!" she said to herself. "Just the very pattern for a schoolmaster's wife. I doubt if Lady Valeria is more than an inch taller; and yet she looks a queen. It is the way she carries her head, I suppose, and the way she walks, like a woman accustomed to command. Yes, a man might well be proud of such a wife, and of the position such a wife could give him. Bothwell in Parliament. Bothwell a great authority on Indian affairs. How strange it sounds! But I know how clever he is, how well he can talk upon any subject. It would be a splendid career for him. And for my sake he is to forego all that, and to drudge as a tutor in a Cornish village. Yes, I suppose it would be a dreary life for such a man--though it seemed so full of brightness when we two talked about it last week. For my sake. No, Bothwell," she said to herself resolutely, striking her clenched hand upon the marble table. "No, Bothwell, not for my sake! You shall not surrender fame and fortune for my sake!"