Perhaps he pitied himself also.  If so, it is to be hoped that Florence may never know of such pity.  Before he went to bed, when he was praying on his knees, he inserted it in his prayers that God in whom he believed might make him true in his faith to Florence Burton.

Chapter XVII

The Rivals

Lady Ongar sat alone, long into the night, when Harry Clavering had left her.  She sat there long, getting up occasionally from her seat, once or twice attempting to write at her desk, looking now and then at a paper or two, and then at a small picture which she had, but passing the long hours in thinking—­in long, sad, solitary thoughts.  What should she do with herself—­with herself, her title, and her money?  Would it be still well that she should do something, that she should make some attempt; or should she, in truth, abandon all, as the arch-traitor did, and acknowledge that for her foot there could no longer be a resting-place on the earth?  At six-and-twenty, with youth, beauty and wealth at her command, must she despair?  But her youth had been stained, her beauty had lost its freshness, and as for her wealth, had she not stolen it?  Did not the weight of the theft sit so heavy on her, that her brightest thought was one which prompted her to abandon it?

As to that idea of giving up her income and her house, and calling herself again Julia Brabazon, though there was something in the poetry of it which would now and again for half an hour relieve her, yet she hardly proposed such a course to herself as a reality.  The world in which she had lived had taught her to laugh at romance, to laugh at it even while she liked its beauty; and she would tell herself that for such a one as her to do such a thing as this, would be to insure for herself the ridicule of all who knew her name.  What would Sir Hugh say, and her sister?  What Count Pateroff and the faithful Sophie?  What all the Ongar tribe, who would reap the rich harvest of her insanity?  These latter would offer to provide her a place in some convenient asylum, and the others would all agree that such would be her fitting destiny.  She could bear the idea of walking forth, as she had said, penniless into the street, without a crust; but she could not bear the idea of being laughed at when she got there.

To her, in her position, her only escape was by marriage.  It was the solitude of her position which maddened her:  its solitude, or the necessity of breaking that solitude by the presence of those who were odious to her.  Whether it were better to be alone, feeding on the bitterness of her own thoughts, or to be comforted by the fulsome flatteries and odious falsenesses of Sophie Gordeloup, she could not tell.  She hated herself for her loneliness, but she hated herself almost worse for submitting herself to the society of Sophie Gordeloup.  Why not give all that she possessed to Harry Clavering—­herself, her income, her rich pastures and horses and oxen, and try whether the world would not be better to her when she had done so.