The color was fast returning to her cheek, and the discords of her feelings and her thoughts gradually resolving themselves into the harmonious and cheerful rhythms of bodily and mental health.

It needed but the timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole programme of her daily mode of being.

The word had been spoken.

She saw its truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast out an unworthy intimate! How hard for any!--but for a girl so young, and who had as yet found so little to love and trust, how cruelly hard! She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue.

Her eyes were fixed on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting.