Those foolish dreams were done with now; and that other dream, of a life
to be spent with the reckless companion of her girlhood, was lost to
Diana Paget. There was no point to which she could look forward in the
future, no star to lure her onward upon life's journey. Her present
position was sufficiently comfortable; and she told herself that she must
needs be weak and wicked if she were not content with her lot. But beyond
the present she dared not look, so blank was the prospect--a desert,
without even the mirage; for her dreams and delusions were gone with her
hope.
Possessed by such a sense of loneliness, it is scarcely strange if
there seemed to her a gleam of joy, a faint glimmer of hope, in the
newly awakened affection of her father. She began to believe him, and
to take comfort from the thought that he was drifting to a haven where
he might lie moored, with other battered old hulks of pirate and
privateer, inglorious and at rest. To work for him and succour him in his
declining years seemed a brighter prospect to this hopeless woman of
four-and-twenty than a future of lonely independence. "It is the nature
of woman to lean," says the masculine philosopher; but is it not rather
her nature to support and sustain, or else why to her is entrusted the
sublime responsibility of maternity? Diana was pleased to think that a
remorseful reprobate might be dependent on her toil, and owe his
reformation to her influence.
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