It was all in a piece with the rest of his character, she said to herself; he had always been cold and hard and self-contained. When his house had been left unto him desolate by the stroke which changed his uncle from a wise and kindly companion into a helpless and peevish child, she had longed to help and comfort him with her sympathy; and he had thrown it back in her face. He was too proud and too superior to care for human affection, she supposed; and now he felt no hesitation in first forsaking her, and then reducing her to poverty, if only by so doing he could set himself still more firmly on the pedestal of his own virtue. So did Elisabeth's imagination traduce Christopher; and Elisabeth listened and believed.
At first she was haunted by memories of how good he had been to her when her cousin Maria died, and many a time before; and she used to dream about him at night with so much of the old trust and affection that it took all the day to stamp out the fragrance of tenderness which her dreams had left behind. But after a time these dreams and memories grew fewer and less distinct, and she persuaded herself that Christopher had never been the true and devoted friend she had once imagined him to be, but that the kind and affectionate Chris of olden days had been merely a creature of her own invention. There was no one to plead his cause for him, as he was far away, and appearances were on the side of his accuser; so he was tried in the court of Elisabeth's merciless young judgment, and sentenced to life-long banishment from the circle of her interests and affections. She forgot how he had comforted her in the day of her adversity. If he had allowed her to comfort him, she would have remembered it forever; but he had not; and in this world men must be prepared to take the consequences of their own mistakes, even though those mistakes be made through excess of devotion to another person.
In certain cases it may be necessary to pluck out the right eye and cut off the right hand; but there is no foundation for supposing that the operation will be any the less painful because of the righteous motive inducing it. And so Christopher Thornley learned by bitter experience, when, after many days, he returned from a fruitless search for the missing heir, to find the countenance of Elisabeth utterly changed toward him. She was quite civil to him--quite polite; she never attempted to argue or quarrel with him as she had done in the old days, and she listened patiently to all the details of his doings in Australia; but with gracious coldness she quietly put him outside the orbit of her life, and showed him plainly that he was now nothing more to her than her trustee and the general manager of her works.
