FOUND WANTING.
Reginald Eversleigh was in complete ignorance of Victor Carrington's proceedings, when he received the letter summoning him to an interview with his friend at a stated time. Carrington's estimate of Reginald's character was quite correct. All this time his vanity had been chafing under Paulina's silence and apparent oblivion of him.
He had not received any letter from Paulina, fond as she had been of writing to him long, half-despairing letters, full of complaint against destiny, and breathing in every line that hopeless love which the beautiful Austrian woman had so long wasted on the egotist and coward, whose baseness she had half suspected even while she still clung to him.
Sir Reginald had been in the habit of receiving these letters as coolly as if they had been but the fitting tribute to his transcendant merits.
"Poor Paulina!" he murmured sometimes, as he folded the perfumed pages, after running his eyes carelessly over their contents; "poor Paulina! how devotedly she loves me. And what a pity she hasn't a penny she can call her own. If she were a great heiress, now, what could be more delightful than this devotion? But, under existing circumstances, it is nothing but an embarrassment—a bore. Unfortunately, I cannot be brutal enough to tell her this plainly: and so matters go on. And I fear, in spite of all my hints, she may believe in the possibility of my ultimately making a sacrifice of my prospects For her sake."
This was how Reginald Eversleigh felt, while Paulina was scattering at his feet the treasures of a disinterested affection.
He had been vain and selfish from boyhood, and his vices grew stronger with increasing years. His nature was hardened, and not chastened, by the trials and disappointments which had befallen him.
In the hour of his poverty and degradation it had been a triumph for him to win the devotion of a woman whom many men—men better than himself—had loved in vain.
It was a rich tribute to the graces of him who had once been the irresistible Reginald Eversleigh, the favourite of fashionable drawing-rooms.
Thus it was that, when Paulina's letters suddenly ceased, Sir Reginald was at once mortified and indignant. He had made up his mind to obey Victor's suggestion, or rather, command, by abstaining from either visiting or writing to Paulina; but he had not been prepared for a similar line of proceeding on her part, and it hurt his vanity much. She had ceased to write. Could she have ceased to care for him? Could any one else, richer—more disinterested—have usurped his place in her heart?