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CYRIL CULVERHOUSE was a miserable man. The woman he loved -- the only woman he had ever loved -- was free to become his wife, dowered with estates worth ten thousand a year, and yet he held himself aloof from her, and shrank from any act which should ratify in the present the tie that had bound them in the past. He, who should have been the first to console the fatherless girl in the hour of bereavement and desolation, to support and counsel her under the difficulties of sudden independence -- he, whose heart yearned towards her in her loneliness, stood apart and allowed her to believe him cold and heartless. The struggle had been a hard one; but, after many troubled days and wakeful nights, he had made up his mind that it must be so. Beatrix and he could never go hand in hand along the path of life.
The cloud that hung over her young life might be a shadow which the light of truth would by and by dispel; but, until the truth should appear, broad and clear as sunlight, he could not take Beatrix Harefield to his heart, he could not bind his life with hers.