The pagoda in her blooming garden figured the arrangement--how otherwise was it to be named ?--by which, so strikingly, she had been able to marry without breaking, as she liked to put it, with the past.

She had surrendered herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition, and yet she had not, all the while, given up her father--the least little inch.

She had compassed the high city of seeing the two men beautifully take to each other, and nothing in her marriage had marked it as more happy than this fact of its having practically given the elder, the lonelier, a new friend.

What had moreover all the while enriched the whole aspect of success was that the latter's marriage had been no more meassurably paid for than her own.

His having taken the same great step in the same free way had not in the least involved the relegation of his daughter.