things.  I do not say it would be noble to marry me; but it would be a noble thing to conquer an ignoble passion.  How could Martin Dobree fall in love with an unknown adventuress?

“I shall remain in the house all day to-morrow, and if you can come to see me, feeling that this has been a dream of folly from which you have awakened, I will not ask you to own it.  That you come at all will be a sign to me that you wish it forgotten and blotted out between us, as if it had never been.

     “With true, deep love for you, Martin, believe me still

     “Your affectionate JULIA.”

I pondered over Julia’s letter as I dressed.  There was not a word of resentment in it.  It was full of affectionate thought for us all.  But what reasoning!  I had not known Olivia so long as I had known her, therefore I could not love her as truly!

A strange therefore!

I had scarcely had leisure to think of Olivia in the hurry and anxiety of the last twenty-four hours.  But now “that person in Sark,” the “unknown adventuress,” presented itself very vividly to my mind.  Know her!  I felt as if I knew every tone of her voice and every expression of her face; yet I longed to know them more intimately.  The note she had written to me a few weeks ago I could repeat word for word, and the handwriting seemed far more familiar to me even than Julia’s.  There was no doubt my love for her was very different from my affection for Julia; and if it was an infatuation, it was the sweetest, most exquisite infatuation that could ever possess me.

Yet there was no longer any hesitation in my mind as to what I must do.  Julia knew all now.  I had told her distinctly of my love for Olivia, and she would not believe it.  She appeared wishful to hold me to my engagement in spite of it; at any rate, so I interpreted her letter.  I did not suppose that I should not live it down, this infatuation, as they chose to call it.  I might hunger and thirst, and be on the point of perishing; then my nature would turn to other nutriment, and assimilate it to its contracted and stultified capacities.

After all there was some reason in the objections urged against Olivia.  The dislike of all insulated people against foreigners is natural enough; and in her case there was a mystery which I must solve before I could think of asking her to become my wife.  Ask her to become my wife!  That was impossible now.  I had chosen my wife months before I saw her.

I went mechanically through the routine of my morning’s work, and it was late in the afternoon before I could get away to ride to the Vale.  My mother knew where I was going, and gazed wistfully into my face, but without otherwise asking me any questions.  At the last moment, as I touched Madam’s bridle, I looked down at her standing on the door-step.  “Cheer up, mother!” I said, almost gayly, “it will all come right.”

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST.