She was rich and powerful; he had nothing but genius; he loved her so that her smile gave him life, her frown was death.  It was pleasant, too, and most romantic, to escape from the thraldom of school to wander with him in the gray twilight through the old orchard and the green lanes; it was pleasant to feel in the depth of her heart a love that no one knew anything of—­no one even understood.  The scenery, viewed from its romantic side, charmed her.

They told her continually how great and noble, how generous she was, and she delighted in hearing it.

“You value genius more than money,” Allan would say to her, “and you are right.  God gives genius, men make money.  You have the power of discriminating between them.”

She began to look upon herself as something very superior indeed—­something far excelling the ordinary run of girls.  They flattered her until she hardly knew what was false and what was true.

She delighted in making pictures of the future; how she was to stoop from the height of her grandeur to raise him; how her wealth was, as it were, to crown his genius.  They told her that the whole world would praise her for her noble generosity.  That the rich heiress who forgot her wealth and became the artist’s wife, would be honored wherever her name was known.  They intoxicated her with romance, they bewildered her with flattery.  And she was only seventeen, with no mother to speak one warning word to her.

She pledged herself to be Allan Lyster’s wife when she came of age.  He told her he would rather forego all claim to her wealth, marry her at once, and leave her guardian to act as he thought best; but she, though delighted to find him free from the least taint of anything mercenary, refused to run the risk of losing her fortune.

“Would you really,” she said to him one day, “love me as much if I were quite poor, as you do now?”

“Would I!  Oh, Marion, what a question to ask me!  The only drawback to my love is that hateful fortune; if it were not for that I would marry you at once.  Ah, you should find out what I loved you for, sweet.  I would work for you night and day.  I would move the whole world to find for my darling that which she would require.”

And the girl in her simplicity believed him, and thought herself the most fortunate among woman to have won a love for herself that had in it no taint of this world.

So they flung the glamor of love and flattery around her, until she lost the keen perception of right and wrong that would have saved her.

She promised to be Allan Lyster’s wife.  When he had won that promise from her, he pretended to think better of it.

“I am wrong to ask you, Marion; I am selfish, I ought not even wish you to share my lot.”

She asked him why, raising her sweet eyes to his face.

“Why, because when you go out into the great world peers and princes will woo you, my darling; the noblest in the land will sue for your favor, and you, who might have been a duchess, will repent loving and caring for one so poor and obscure as I am.  I can give you no title.”