During the last three days, left to the companionship of her own sad thoughts, and unable to see Olga alone for even a moment, more than one painful and unutterably bitter discovery had been made.  She felt that indeed her childhood had flown for ever, that the sacred mysterious chrism of womanhood had been poured upon her young heart.

Until forced to observe the marked admiration which in his own house Mr. Palma evinced when conversing with Mrs. Carew, Regina had been conscious only of a profound respect for him, of a deeply grateful appreciation of his protecting care; and even when he interrogated her with reference to her affection for Mr. Lindsay, she had truthfully averred her conviction that her heart was wholly disengaged.

But sternly honest in dealing with her own soul, subsequent events had painfully shocked her into a realization of the feeling that first manifested itself as she watched Mr. Palma and Mrs. Carew at the dinner-table.

She knew now that the keen pang she suffered that day could mean nothing less solemn and distressing than the mortifying fact that she was beginning to love her guardian.  Not merely as a grateful, respectful ward, the august lawyer who represented her mother’s authority, but as a woman once, and once only in life, loves the man, whom her pure tender heart humbly acknowledges as her king, her high-priest, her one divinity in clay.

Although conscience acquitted her of any intentional weakness, her womanly pride and delicacy bled at every pore, when she arraigned herself for being guilty of this emotion toward one who regarded her as a child, who merely pitied her forlorn isolation; and whose eye would fill with fiery scorn, could he dream of her presumptuous, her unfeminine folly.

Despite the chronic sneers with which Olga always referred to his character and habitual conduct, Regina could not withhold a reverence for his opinion, and an earnest admiration of his grave, dignified, yet polished deportment in his household.

By degrees her early dread and repulsion had melted away, confidence and respect usurped their place; and gradually he had grown and heightened in her estimation, until suddenly opening her eyes wide she saw that Erle Palma filled all the horizon of her hopes.

During three sleepless nights she had kept her eyes riveted upon this unexpected and mournful fact, and while deeply humiliated by the discovery, she proudly resolved to uproot and cast out of her heart the alien growth, which she felt could prove only the upas of her future.  Allowing herself absolutely no hope, no pardon, no quarter, she sternly laid the axe of indignant condemnation and destruction to the daring off-shoot, desperately hewing at her very heart-strings.

Mrs. Carew’s manner left little doubt that she was leaning like a ripe peach within his reach, ready at a touch to fall into his hand; and though Regina felt that this low-browed, sibyl-eyed woman was vastly his inferior in all save beauty and wealth, she knew that even his failure to marry the widow would furnish no justification for the further indulgence of her own foolish and unsought preference.