Alas! said the preacher, if he had only devoted his great talents to the service of the Good and the True!  Behold how vain are all the triumphs of this world! see the result of the worship of Mammon!  My friends, the age is materialized, a spirit of worldliness is abroad; be vigilant, lest the deceitfulness of riches send your souls to perdition.  And the plain country people thanked God for such a warning, and the country girl dreamed of Margaret’s career, and the country boy studied the ways of Henderson’s success, and resolved that he, too, would seek his fortune in this bad metropolis.

The, Hendersons were important people.  It was impossible that a knowledge of their importance should not have a reflex influence upon Margaret.  Could it be otherwise than that gradually the fineness of her discrimination should be dulled by the almost universal public consent in the methods by which Henderson had achieved his position, and that in time she should come to regard adverse judgment as the result of envy?  Henderson himself was under less illusion; the world was about what he had taken it for, only a little worse—­more gullible, and with less principle.  Carmen had mocked at Margaret’s belief in Henderson.  It is certainly a pitiful outcome that Margaret, with her naturally believing nature, should in the end have had a less clear perception of what was right and wrong than Henderson himself.  Yet Henderson would not have shrunk, any more than Carmen would, from any course necessary to his ends, while Margaret would have shrunk from many things; but in absolute worldliness, in devotion to it, the time had come when Henderson felt that his Puritan wife was no restraint upon him.  It was this that broke gentle Miss Forsythe’s heart when she came fully to realize it.

I said that the world was at Margaret’s feet.  Was it?  How many worlds are there, and does one ever, except by birth (in a republic), conquer them all?  Truth to say, there were penetralia in New York society concerning which this successful woman was uneasy in her heart.  There were people who had accepted her invitations, to whose houses she had been, who had a dozen ways of making her feel that she was not of them.  These people—­I suppose that if two castaways landed naked on a desert island, one of them would instantly be the ancien regime—­had spoken of Mrs. Henderson and her ambition to the Earl of Chisholm in a way that pained him.  They graciously assumed that he, as one of the elect, would understand them.  It was therefore with a heavy heart that he came to say good-by to Margaret before his return.

I cannot imagine anything more uncomfortable for an old lover than a meeting of this sort; but I suppose the honest fellow could not resist the inclination to see Margaret once more.  I dare say she had a little flutter of pride in receiving him, in her consciousness of the change in herself into a wider experience of the world.  And she may have been a little chagrined that he was not apparently more impressed by her surroundings, nor noticed the change in herself, but met her upon the ground of simple sincerity where they had once stood.  What he tried to see, what she felt he was trying to see, was not the beautiful woman about whose charm and hospitality the town talked, but the girl he had loved in the old days.