you were put off with a slight word, he has taken Me to his heart!’

She said it with a taunting pride in the midst of her frenzy — for it was little less — yet with an eager remembrance of it, in which the smouldering embers of a gentler feeling kindled for the moment.

‘I descended — as I might have known I should, but that he fascinated me with his boyish courtship — into a doll, a trifle for the occupation of an idle hour, to be dropped, and taken up, and trifled with, as the inconstant humour took him. When he grew weary, I grew weary. As his fancy died out, I would no more have tried to strengthen any power I had, than I would have married him on his being forced to take me for his wife. We fell away from one another without a word. Perhaps you saw it, and were not sorry.