From her childhood up she had loved Rule Rothsay as a sister loves a favorite brother.  In her girlhood, knowing no stronger love, on the strength of this she accepted the offered hand of Rothsay, and was engaged to be married to him.  She meant to have been faithful to him; but it was a long engagement, during which she traveled with her grandparents for three years, while the memory of her calmly loved betrothed husband grew rather dim.  Then came her meeting with the handsome and accomplished young Duke of Cumbervale, and the infatuation, the hallucination that enslaved her imagination for a period.  Then began the mental conflict between inclination and duty, ending in her resolution to forget her English lover and to be true to Rule.

Up to the very wedding day she had suppressed and controlled her feelings with heroic firmness, but on the evening of that day, while waiting for her husband, the long, severe tension of her nerves utterly gave way, and when found in a paroxysm of tears and questioned by him, in her wretchedness and misery she had confessed the infidelity of her heart and pleaded for time to conquer it.

She had expected bitter reproaches, but there were none.  She had dreaded fierce anger, but there was none.  She had anticipated obduracy, but there was none.  There was nothing but intense suffering, divine compassion, and infinite renunciation.  He pitied her.  He soothed her.  He defended her from the reproaches of her own conscience.  He protected her by an imposed provision that for her own sake she should not tell others what she had told him.  And then—­

He laid down all the honors that his life-long toil and self-denial had won for her sake, and he went out from his triumphs, went out from her life—­out, out into the outer darkness of oblivion, to be seen no more of men, to be heard of no more by men.  All for her sake.  And before the majesty of such infinite love, such infinite renunciation, her whole soul bowed down in adoration.  Yes, at last, in the hour of losing him she loved him as he longed to be loved by her.  She had but one desire on earth—­to be at his side.  But one prayer, and that was her “vital breath”—­for his return.

She felt herself to be unworthy of the measureless love that he had given her—­that he still gave her, if he still lived, for his love had known no shadow of turning, nor ever would suffer change.

But, oh! where in space was he?  How could she reach him?  How could she make him hear the cry of her heart?

One message, like a voice from the grave, had, indeed, come to her from him since his disappearance, but it had been sent before he left the house; it was in the letter he had written and placed in the secret drawer of her writing desk before he went forth that fatal night, a “wanderer through the world’s wilderness.”