f so well would his
native land have pleaded for the forgiveness of a British damsel who had
wrecked a young man's immoderate first love. That glorified self-love
requires the touch upon imagination of strangeness and an unaccustomed
grace, to subdue it and make it pardon an outrage to its temples and
altars, and its happy reading of the heavens, the earth too: earth
foremost, we ought perhaps to say. It is an exacting heathen, best
understood by a glance at what will appease it: beautiful, however, as
everybody has proved; and shall it be decried in a world where beauty is
not overcommon, though it would slaughter us for its angry satisfaction,
yet can be soothed by a tone of colour, as it were by a novel
inscription on a sweetmeat?

The peculiarity of Beauchamp was that he knew the slenderness of the
thread which was leading him, and foresaw it twisting to a coil unless
he should hold firm. His work in life was much above the love of a woman
in his estimation, so he was not deluded by passion when he entered
the chateau; it is doubtful whether he would not hesitatingly have
sacrificed one of the precious votes in Bevisham for the pleasure of
kissing her hand when they were on the steps. She was his first love and
only love, married, and long ago forgiven:--married; that is to say, she
especially among women was interdicted to him by the lingering shadow
of the reverential love gone by; and if the anguish of the lover's worse
than death survived in a shudder of memory at the thought of her not
solely lost to him but possessed by another, it did but quicken a hunger
that was three parts curiosity to see how she who had suffered this bore
the change; how like or unlike she might be to the extinct Renee; what
traces she kept of the face he had known. Her tears were startling, but
tears tell of a mood, they do not tell the story of the years; and it
was that story he had such eagerness to read in one brief revelation:
an eagerness born only of the last few hours, and broken by fears of a
tarnished aspect; these again being partly hopes of a coming disillusion
that would restore him his independence and ask him only for pity. The
slavery of the love of a woman chained like Renee was the most revolting
of prospects to a man who cherished his freedom that he might work
to the end of his time. Moreover, it swung a thunder-cloud across his
holiday. He recurred to the idea of the holiday repeatedly, and the
more he did so the th