Victoria sat upright, her mood strung to an intensity which knew no
fears. It was twenty years since she had last seen Edmund Melrose, and it
was thirty years and more since she had rescued her sister from his
grasp, and the duel between herself and him had ended in her final
victory.
How dim they seemed, those far-off days!--when for some two or three
years, either in London or in Paris, where her father was Ambassador, she
had been in frequent contact with a group of young men--of young
"bloods"--conspicuous in family and wealth, among whom Edmund Melrose was
the reckless leader of a dare-devil set. She thought of a famous picture
of the young Beckford, by Lawrence, to which Melrose on the younger
side of forty had been frequently compared. The same romantic beauty of
feature, the same liquid depth of eye, the same splendid carriage; and,
combined with these, the same insolence and selfishness. There had been
in Victoria's earlier youth moments when to see him enter a ballroom was
to feel her head swim with excitement; when to carry him off from a rival
was a passionate delight; when she coveted his praise, and dreaded his
sarcasm. And yet--it was perfectly true what she had said to Harry. She
had never been in love with him. The imagination of an "unlessoned girl"
had been fired; but when the glamour in which it had wrapped the man had
been torn away by the disclosure of some ugly facts concerning him; when
she broke with him in disgust, and induced others to break with him; it
was not her feelings, not her heart, which had suffered.
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