Bella wrote a touching letter to her sister, a letter that ought to have touched Camilla, begging for forgiveness, and for one word of sisterly love.  Camilla answered the letter, but did not send a word of sisterly love.  ’According to my way of thinking, you have been a nasty sly thing, and I don’t believe you’ll ever be happy.  As for him, I’ll never speak to him again.’  That was nearly the whole of her letter.  ’You must leave it to time,’ said Mrs French wisely;’she’ll come round some day.’  And then Mrs French thought how bad it would be for her if the daughter who was to be her future companion did not ‘come round’ some day.

And so it was settled that they should be married in Heavitree Church, Mr Gibson and his first love, and things went on pretty much as though nothing had been done amiss.  The gentleman from Cornwall came down to take Mr Gibson’s place at St. Peter’s-cum-Pumpkin, while his duties in the Cathedral were temporarily divided among the other priest-vicars -with some amount of grumbling on their part.  Bella commenced her modest preparations without any of the eclat which had attended Camilla’s operations, but she felt more certainty of ultimate success than had ever fallen to Camilla’s lot.  In spite of all that had come and gone, Bella never feared again that Mr Gibson would be untrue to her.  In regard to him, it must be doubted whether Nemesis ever fell upon him with a hand sufficiently heavy to punish him for the great sins which he had manifestly committed.  He had encountered a bad week or two, and there had been days in which, as has been said, he thought of Natal, of ecclesiastical censures, and even of annihilation; but no real punishment seemed to fall upon him.  It may be doubted whether, when the whole arrangement was settled for him, and when he heard that Camilla had yielded to the decrees of Fate, he did not rather flatter himself on being a successful man of intrigue, whether he did not take some glory to himself for his good fortune with women, and pride himself amidst his self-reproaches for the devotion which had been displayed for him by the fair sex in general.  It is quite possible that he taught himself to believe that at one time Dorothy Stanbury was devotedly in love with him, and that when he reckoned up his sins she was one of those in regard to whom he accounted himself to have been a sinner.  The spirit of intrigue with women, as to which men will flatter themselves, is customarily so vile, so mean, so vapid a reflection of a feeling, so aimless, resultless, and utterly unworthy!  Passion exists and has its sway.  Vice has its votaries and there is, too, that worn-out longing for vice, ’prurient, yet passionless, cold-studied lewdness’, which drags on a feeble continuance with the aid of money.  But the commonest folly of man in regard to women is a weak taste for intrigue, with little or nothing on which to feed it a worse than feminine aptitude for male coquetry, which never ascends beyond a desire