but with its chief beauties all exaggerated,
as it were, in some undefinable way.
Veronica's figure was a little fuller than it
had been. And the tendency to heaviness
about her cheeks and jaw had slightly
developed itself. Her thick eye-lashes
were intensely—it seemed almost
unnaturally—black. The semicircle of her jetty
brows was defined with the hard precision
of a geometrical line. Her glossy hair
was pulled down in waves as accurate as
those that edge a scollop-shell, so as to
leave visible scarce a finger's breadth of
forehead—an arrangement which at once
lowered, and made ignobly sensual, the
whole type and character of her face. Her
cheeks and lips were tinged with a vivid
red. Her once supple waist was
compressed into a painfully small girdle. In a
word, Artifice had laid its debasing hand
on her every natural grace and beauty.

A " thing of beauty" painted, pinched,
padded, yielded up to the low devices of
coquetry, becomes not a "joy," but a toy,
for ever. And then, with the contemptible
and grotesque, what tragedy is mingled,
when we see a living human soul prisoned
behind the doll's mask, and fluttering its
maimed pinions against the base enamelled
falsehood. Such a soul looked out of
Veronica's lustrous eyes into Maud's as
they remained gazing at each other, hand
in hand.

"I would ask you to forgive me, Maud,"
said Veronica, " but that I think you are
happy."

"To forgive you, Veronica?"

"To forgive my depriving you of your
fortune," said Veronica, quickly. "That
is what I mean. But you never coveted
wealth."

Veronica had, unconsciously to herself,
acquired the habit of assuming with
complacent security, that whosoever refrained
from grasping at an object, or repining
at its loss, must be indifferent to it, and
exempt from any combat with desire:
like those savages who, modern travellers
tell us, are incapable of conceiving any
check to tyranny, save the limit of power
to tyrannise.

"Don't speak of that dreadful money!"
cried Maud, impulsively. " I hate to think
of it."

Veronica dropped Maud's hands, drew
back, and seated herself on a low prie-dieu.
There was an air of self-assertion in her
nonchalant attitude, and she toyed
carelessly with a magnificent diamond ring
that glittered on her finger.

"Dear Veronica," said Maud, clasping
her hands together as they lay on her lap,
"it does indeed seem, as you say, like a
dream. All that weary, weary time—Oh,
my poor Veronica, if you could know how
we missed you and mourned for you!"

Maud did not realise as yet how far apart
they two were. Veronica's life during her
absence from England was unknown to
Maud. She imaged it confusedly to herself,
as a time of disappointment, remorse, and
sorrow. The two girls had always been
very different even in childhood. But the
courses of their lives had been parallel, so
to speak; and as time brought to each
character its natural development, they did
not seem for a while to grow more widely
sundered. But from the day of Veronica's
flight—and doubtless for many a day
previous, only that the divergence up to that
point was too slight and subtle to be
observed—the two lives had branched apart,
and tended ever further from each other, to
the end. Veronica was more sensible of
this than Maud. She felt instinctively that
the downward-tending path she had been
pursuing was not clearly conceivable to
Maud. Nor in truth had the latter any
idea of the degrading flatteries, the base
suspicions, the humiliating hypocrisies, the
petty ambitions, the paltry pleasures, and
corroding cares, ennobled by no spark of
unselfish love, which had made up the
existence of the vicar's daughter.

The one had been journeying through a
home-like country, which never in its dreariest
parts quite lost the wide prospect of the
sky, or the breath of pure air; although
the former might drop chill rain, and the
latter might blow roughly, at times. The
other had plunged into a tropical jungle:
beautiful on its borders with gay birds and
flowers; but within, dark, stifling, and
deadly.

Veronica was conscious of a shade of
disappointment on once more beholding
Maud. She was disappointed in herself.
She had been moved and startled by the
first sight of Maud; but no tears had welled
up from her heart into her eyes. No deep
emotion had been stirred. She felt, with a
sort of unacknowledged dread, that she had
grown harder than of old. She had yearned
for the luxury of genuine feeling, and
recalled the sweetness of impulsive
affectionate moments when she had forgotten, by
Maud's side, to be vain and selfish. But
now the springs of pure tenderness seemed
to be dry. She was uneasy until she
could assert her grandeur, her success, her