“How many unmarried women in England are there would do the same?” she said to herself, as she folded the paper, and put it into an envelope, and sealed the cover.  The moment that the letter was completed she sent it off, as she was directed to send it, so that there might be no possibility of repentance and subsequent hesitation.  She had at last made up her mind, and she would stand by the making.  She knew that there would come moments in which she would deeply regret the opportunity that she had lost,—­the chance of greatness that she had flung away from her.  But so would she have often regretted it, also, had she accepted the greatness.  Her position was one in which there must be regret, let her decision have been what it might.  But she had decided, and the thing was done.  She would still be free,—­Marie Max Goesler,—­unless in abandoning her freedom she would obtain something that she might in truth prefer to it.  When the letter was gone she sat disconsolate, at the window of an up-stairs room in which she had written, thinking much of the coronet, much of the name, much of the rank, much of that position in society which she had flattered herself she might have won for herself as Duchess of Omnium by her beauty, her grace, and her wit.  It had not been simply her ambition to be a duchess, without further aim or object.  She had fancied that she might have been such a duchess as there is never another, so that her fame might have been great throughout Europe, as a woman charming at all points.  And she would have had friends, then,—­real friends, and would not have lived alone as it was now her fate to do.  And she would have loved her ducal husband, old though he was, and stiff with pomp and ceremony.  She would have loved him, and done her best to add something of brightness to his life.  It was indeed true that there was one whom she loved better; but of what avail was it to love a man who, when he came to her, would speak to her of nothing but of the charms which he found in another woman!

She had been sitting thus at her window, with a book in her hand, at which she never looked, gazing over the park which was now beautiful with its May verdure, when on a sudden a thought struck her.  Lady Glencora Palliser had come to her, trying to enlist her sympathy for the little heir, behaving, indeed, not very well, as Madame Goesler had thought, but still with an earnest purpose which was in itself good.  She would write to Lady Glencora and put her out of her misery.  Perhaps there was some feeling of triumph in her mind as she returned to the desk from which her epistle had been sent to the Duke;—­not of that triumph which would have found its gratification in boasting of the offer that had been made to her, but arising from a feeling that she could now show the proud mother of the bold-faced boy that though she would not pledge herself to any woman as to what she might do or not do, she was nevertheless capable of resisting such a temptation as would have been irresistible