Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/107

Rh hood—so he thought—could never be lowered while Katharine lived; and in his blind worship of her, all other women, Dora among the rest, had become exalted. He knew his wife to be vain and artificial—a creature unaccountably made up of small caprices, gold dust, millinery, without an employment, without an interest in life that he could understand, but still a woman, with all her smaller demerits, more than worthy of his reverence. What worse sins could be laid to Dora's account than undue love for balls and theatres, or, perhaps, a half-foolish, half-tender feeling for Mr. Clarenclon Whyte in days gone by? Happy for him if his own conscience could show as unblotted a score!

Well, she had conquered now, poor child, and it was best for him that she had done so. In obeying her wishes he would be taken bodily away out of the reach of temptation; would be forced—not into forgetting: that was impossible—but out of the groove, at least, of loving Katharine Fane! Would have learned to live without her before her marriage should divide them more irrevocably still, and forever.

He thought all this honestly; and yet, if the inmost desire of his heart could have availed him, Steven's life had been arrested at this very turning-point of its course. Which of us, midway in some doubtful enterprise, has not felt the same? has not shrunk, cowardly, from the thought of any progress beyond the present scanty good? He had lost Katharine, but he saw her daily; was nothing to her but a sort of upper groom or tolerated humble relation, yet was that. The past, with its honeyed poison, its alternation of fierce joys and miseries, was over; that moment in the boat when she had let him hold her hands, that moment on his marriage-day when they had bidden silent farewells and he had guessed the meaning written on her white face—all over. The future belonged to Dora and to Lord Petres. If the present—this very bubble on the foam, this very break of the wave upon the shore—would but stay!

And already the wave has broken, the bubble burst; and Dora, up stairs, is tearing Mr. Clarendon Whyte's letter into smallest atoms, while she vacillates in her mind between lilac serge and bronze-brown silk as a suitable costume wherein to travel to Paris.

next morning Mrs. Lawrence, her health already improved, walked over to the Dene, and, not a little to her surprise, found Katharine a powerful auxiliary as to the Paris scheme. Mrs. Hilliard, whose temper was ever fitful on Sunday—it was her custom to replace sensational by theological fiction on that day—went