the calm grateful liking which she had told herself must needs be the sole version of the grand passion whereof her nature was capable, had been only the tamest, most ordinary kind of friendship after all, and that in the depths of her soul there was a capacity for an utterly different attachment—­a love which was founded on neither respect nor gratitude, but which sprang into life in a moment, fatal and all-absorbing from its birth.

Heaven knows she had struggled bravely against this luckless passion, had resisted long and steadily the assiduous pursuit, the passionate half-despairing pleading, of her lover, who would not be driven away, and who invented all kinds of expedients for seeing her, however difficult the business might be, or however resolutely she might endeavour to avoid him.  It was only after her uncle’s death, when her mind was weakened by excessive grief, that her strong determination to remain faithful to her absent betrothed had at last given way before the force of those tender passionate prayers, and she had consented to the hasty secret marriage which her lover had proposed.  Her consent once given, not a moment had been lost.  The business had been hurried on with the utmost eagerness by the impetuous lover, who would give her as little opportunity as possible of changing her mind, and who had obtained complete mastery of her will from the moment in which she promised to be his wife.

She loved him with all the unselfish devotion of which her nature was capable; and no thought of the years to come, or of what her future life might be with this man, of whose character and circumstances she knew so very little, ever troubled her.  Having sacrificed her fidelity to Gilbert Fenton, she held all other sacrifices light as air—­never considered them at all, in fact.  When did a generous romantic girl of nineteen ever stop to calculate the chances of the future, or fear to encounter poverty and trouble with the man she loved?  To Marian this man was henceforth all the world.  It was not that he was handsomer, or better, or in any obvious way superior to Gilbert Fenton.  It was only that he was just the one man able to win her heart.  That mysterious attraction which reason can never reduce to rule, which knows no law of precedent or experience, reigned here in full force.  It is just possible that the desperate circumstances of the attachment, the passionate pursuit of the lover, not to be checked by any obstacle, may have had an influence upon the girl’s mind.  There was a romance in such love as this that had not existed in Mr. Fenton’s straightforward wooing; and Marian was too young to be quite proof against the subtle charm of a secret, romantic, despairing passion.