Page:Romance & Reality 3.pdf/332

330  throughout Europe. There was one agreeable piece of self-deception attending it—he called the splendid allowance which Beatrice was made the medium of offering him, a fine proof of the Hon. Mr. Lorraine's devotion to the interests of science. It is an excellent plan to generalise individual gratitude—it makes an obligation sit so very lightly. Beatrice was still as much an orphan as amid the lonely woods of Andalusia; but now she needed not the care nor the support of her kindred. One heart kept over her the deep and eternal watch of love; and perhaps her own attachment to her husband was more passionate and entire, that earth held not another tie to claim one thought. The world said that the beautiful Spaniard was cold as she was beautiful—too reserved and too proud for attraction. True it was that early habits of silence and reserve, and the timidity born of long solitude, together with a high and ideal creed of the sacredness of affection, made Beatrice shrink away from the many, to concentrate her whole existence upon the one. Edward could scarcely love her the less, because for him only her eye brightened, and her cheek flushed into crimson—that for him only her smile softened into