These men who are so beautiful as Phoebus are always deceivers.  But you need not be the one deceived—­you with your money and your beauty and your—­what you call rank.  No, I think not; and I think that little girl must put up with it, as other little girls have done, since the men first learned how to tell lies.  That is my advice, and if you will let me I can give you good assistance.

Dearest Julie, think of all this, and do not banish your Sophie.  I am so true to you, that I cannot live without you.  Send me back one word of permission, and I will come to you, and kneel at your feet.  And in the meantime, I am your most devoted friend,

    Sophie.

Lady Ongar, on the receipt of this letter, was not at all changed in her purpose with reference to Madam Gordeloup.  She knew well enough where her Sophie’s heart was placed, and would yield to no further pressure from that quarter; but Sophie’s reasoning, nevertheless, had its effect.  She, Lady Ongar, with her youth, her beauty, her wealth, and her rank, why should she not have that one thing which alone could make her happy, seeing, as she did see, or as she thought she saw, that in making herself happy she could do so much, could confer such great blessings on him she loved?  She had already found that the money she had received as the price of herself had done very little toward making her happy in her present state.  What good was it to her that she had a carriage and horses and two footmen six feet high?  One pleasant word from lips that she could love—­from the lips of man or woman that she could esteem—­would be worth it all.  She had gone down to her pleasant place in the country—­a place so pleasant that it had a fame of its own among the luxuriantly pleasant seats of the English country gentry; she had gone there, expecting to be happy in the mere feeling that it was all her own; and the whole thing had been to her so unutterably sad, so wretched in the severity of its desolation, that she had been unable to endure her life amid the shade of her own trees.  All her apples hitherto had turned to ashes between her teeth, because her fate had forced her to attempt the eating of them alone.  But if she could give the fruit to him—­if she could make the apples over, so that they should all be his, and not hers, then would there not come to her some of the sweetness of the juice of them?

She declared to herself that she would not tempt this man to be untrue to his troth, were it not that in doing so she would so greatly benefit himself.  Was it not manifest that Harry Clavering was a gentleman, qualified to shine among men of rank and fashion, but not qualified to make his way by his own diligence?  In saying this of him, she did not know how heavy was the accusation that she brought against him; but what woman, within her own breast, accuses the man she loves?  Were he to marry Florence Burton, would he not ruin himself and probably ruin her also?