difference if we loved, and will call me selfish.  Not so, not so!  She might have married as soon as it pleased her, and I should have been glad.  It would have made a difference, of course:  she must in some sort have been parted from me, but that I could have borne if it made her happy.  But from her acceptance of her lover—­about whom we will say nothing, save that he was the sort of man she had always held in abhorrence—­she has coolly ignored my right to any part or lot in her fate.  She had told me (or I, poor fool! thought so) every hope and fear of her life:  now she told me what she chose, and was astonished that I expected more—­hurt that I seemed changed and did not find my friendship flourish on crumbs after being nourished for years from full loaves—­was quite unhappy that I cared so little for the minor concerns of her life, when, good lack!  I did not know what I might or might not ask and not be snubbed; for once she told me there were things due to the man one is going to marry (at that time she had not got to the extent of saying whom one loves) that could not be spoken of to me.  Of course she had only to mention the fact to me to make it perfectly plain, and henceforth he and his doings, his belongings and himself, all of them of the tamest sort at best, were a sealed book to me.  And again she quenched a feeble effort of mine to get back to my old place, by telling me such topics she could discuss only with her sister, “her shadow sister” she prettily called her.  So I am desolate!

Knowing this, you may understand in some degree what could induce a little waif like me to accept such an offer as yours.  I think no one in all God’s earth is more desolate than I. In my heart I bear always that unforgotten love in my life.  I have only a barren waste to show.  It is as if I had started from a lovely, radiant garden in the fair morning of my life, in which I had left the bright, sweet rose of my love, and walking along a narrow, dark path, had clasped hands with, and drawn my light and warmth from, a figure walking close beside me; and though from all sides as I walked forms had come to me, offering me fair fruits and sweet flowers, I declined them all without ever a word of thanks, being so content with my one companion.  And suddenly, when all my youth, all my prospects of other things, had gone, this idealized one had withdrawn its hand-clasp, and turning on me a face I did not know, faded into darkness, leaving me nothing but my broken hopes, a wreath of withered flowers,

  “Tangled down in chains about my feet.”

You do not of course realize how the old French emigre blood in my veins, inherited from my father, makes this a very vital matter to me.  We cling to our hopes very tenaciously while they abide—­then we are distraught.  We loved, my father and I, very few, but those with a clinging oneness that is wellnigh pain:  he loved my mother and myself—­that was all.  Likewise I had my two:  they having