of hers never failed to cause him confusion and anxiety.  They commonly intimated themselves parenthetically in the midst of some blissful talk they were having, and overcast his clear sky with retrospective ideals of conduct or presentimental plans for contingencies that might never occur.  He found himself suddenly under condemnation for not having reproved her at a given time when she forced him to admit she had seemed unkind or cold to others; she made him promise that even at the risk of alienating her affections he would make up for her deficiencies of behaviour in such matters whenever he noticed them.  She now praised him for what he had done for Mrs. Frobisher and her sister at Mrs. Bellingham’s reception; she said it was generous, heroic.  But Mavering rested satisfied with his achievement in that instance, and did not attempt anything else of the kind.  He did not reason from cause to effect in regard to it:  a man’s love is such that while it lasts he cannot project its object far enough from him to judge it reasonable or unreasonable; but Dan’s instincts had been disciplined and his perceptions sharpened by that experience.  Besides, in bidding him take this impartial and even admonitory course toward her, she stipulated that they should maintain to the world a perfect harmony of conduct which should be an outward image of the union of their lives.  She said that anything less than a continued self-sacrifice of one to the other was not worthy of the name of love, and that she should not be happy unless he required this of her.  She said that they ought each to find out what was the most distasteful thing which they could mutually require, and then do it; she asked him to try to think what she most hated, and let her do that for him; as for her, she only asked to ask nothing of him.

Mavering could not worship enough this nobility of soul in her, and he celebrated it to Boardman with the passionate need of imparting his rapture which a lover feel.  Boardman acquiesced in silence, with a glance of reserved sarcasm, or contented himself with laconic satire of his friend’s general condition, and avoided any comment that might specifically apply to the points Dan made.  Alice allowed him to have this confidant, and did not demand of him a report of all he said to Boardman.  A main fact of their love, she said, must be their utter faith in each other.  She had her own confidante, and the disparity of years between her and Miss Cotton counted for nothing in the friendship which their exchange of trust and sympathy cemented.  Miss Cotton, in the freshness of her sympathy and the ideality of her inexperience, was in fact younger than Alice, at whose feet, in the things of soul and character, she loved to sit.  She never said to her what she believed:  that a girl of her exemplary principles, a nature conscious of such noble ideals, so superior to other girls, who in her place would be given up to the happiness of the moment, and indifferent to