Now, even though no one else should know it,--and all would know it,--she would be the girl who had condescended to love young Tregear.
His own Duchess, she whose loss to him now was as though he had lost half his limbs,--had not she in the same way loved a Tregear, or worse than a Tregear, in her early days?
Ah yes! And though his Cora had been so much to him, had he not often felt, had he not been feeling all his days, that Fate had robbed him of the sweetest joy that is given to man, in that she had not come to him loving him with her early spring of love, as she had loved that poor ne'er-do-well?
How infinite had been his regrets.

How often had he told himself that, with all that Fortune had given him, still Fortune had been unjust to him because he had been robbed of that.

Not to save his life could he have whispered a word of this to any one, but he had felt it.

He had felt it for years.

Dear as she had been, she had not been quite what she should have been but for that.