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Rh was glad to escape from trouble and vexation, both of which must inevitably have fallen to his share if Francesca had insisted on her right; and he did feel grateful to her for what she had saved him. But he was quite incapable of appreciating the delicacy, the generosity, the high-mindedness, which prompted her conduct; still less could he enter into the bitter and painful sense of degradation which sank into her very soul. From her childhood, the pride of ancestry, in its noblest and most imaginative feeling, had been cultivated by her grandfather's narratives of the heroic deeds and knightly bearing of the noble house of Carrara. The pride which most bestow on the present, he lavished on the past; or, rather, all he could spare from science he gave to history; and his two children were deeply imbued with a sense of what they owed to their illustrious race. Their name was as a bond against meanness or disgrace. The pure and high blood which flowed in their veins was its own and best security.

No one could have felt more keenly than Francesca what she resigned. For the last few weeks, hope, so long dormant—for even hope yields to the impossible—hope had delighted to dwell on a future, from which it had so long turned away. She had imagined herself acknowledged and