Never! never! never!  Their fates were fixed.  For him, poor insect as he was, a solitary flight by day, and a return at evening to his wingless mate!  For her—­he thought he saw her doom.

Could he give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless egotist, who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining net all around her?  Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly.  He could not perhaps have spread his character out in set words, as we must do for him, for it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to describe analytically what we know as soon as we see it; but he felt in his inner consciousness all that we must tell for him.  Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing, capable of winning a woman infinitely above himself, incapable of understanding her,—­oh, if he could but touch him with the angel’s spear, and bid him take his true shape before her whom he was gradually enveloping in the silken meshes of his subtle web!  He would make a place for her in the world,—­oh yes, doubtless.  He would be proud of her in company, would dress her handsomely, and show her off in the best lights.  But from the very hour that he felt his power over her firmly established, he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly pattern.  He would dismantle her of her womanly ideals, and give her in their place his table of market-values.  He would teach her to submit her sensibilities to her selfish interest, and her tastes to the fashion of the moment, no matter which world or half-world it came from.  “As the husband is, the wife is,”—­he would subdue her to what he worked in.

All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the wife of Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he did, from the few times he had seen him.  He would be rich by and by, very probably.  He looked like one of those young men who are sharp, and hard enough to come to fortune.  Then she would have to take her place in the great social exhibition where the gilded cages are daily opened that the animals may be seen, feeding on the sight of stereotyped toilets and the sound of impoverished tattle.  O misery of semi-provincial fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit’s end to avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid!  How many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony of dressing, dawdling, and driving!

This could not go on so forever.  Clement had placed a red curtain so as to throw a rose-bloom on his marble, and give it an aspect which his fancy turned to the semblance of life.  He would sit and look at the features his own hand had so faithfully wrought, until it seemed as if the lips moved, sometimes as if they were smiling, sometimes as if they were ready to speak to him.  His companions began to