have I wasted! The
mainstring of my existence was snapped; I took no note of time. And
therefore now, you see, late in life, Nemesis wakes. I look back with
regret at powers neglected, opportunities gone. Galvanically I brace up
energies half-palsied by disuse; and you see me, rather than rest quiet
and good for nothing, talked into what, I dare say, are sad follies, by
an Uncle Jack! And now I behold Ellinor again; and I say in wonder: 'All
this--all this--all this agony, all this torpor, for that, haggard
face, that worldly spirit!' So is it ever in life: mortal things fade;
immortal things spring more freshly with every step to the tomb.

"Ah!" continued my father, with a sigh, "it would not have been so if at
your age I had found out the secret of the saffron bag!"

CHAPTER IX.

"And Roland, sir," said I, "how did he take it?"

"With all the indignation of a proud, unreasonable man; more indignant,
poor fellow, for me than himself. And so did he wound and gall me by
what he said of Ellinor, and so did he rage against me because I would
not share his rage, that again we quarrelled. We parted, and did not
meet for many years. We came into sudden possession of our little
fortunes. His he devoted (as you may know) to the purchase of the old
ruins and the commission in the army, which had always been his
dream; and so went his way, wrathful. My share gave me an excuse for
indolence,--it satisfied all my wants; and when my old tutor died, and
his young child became my ward, and, somehow or other, from my ward my
wife, it allowed me to resign my fellowship and live amongst my books,
still as a book myself. One comfort, somewhat before my marriage, I
had conceived; and that, too, Roland has since said was comfort to
him,--Ellinor became an heiress. Her poor brother died, and all of the
estate that did not pass in the male line devolved on her. That fortune
made a gulf between us almost as wide as her marriage. For Ellinor poor
and portionless, in spite of her rank, I could have worked, striven,
slaved; but Ellinor Rich! it would have crushed me. This was a comfort.
But still, still the past,--that perpetual aching sense of something
that had seemed the essential of life withdrawn from life evermore,
evermore! What was left was not sorrow,--it was a void. Had I lived more
with men, and less with dreams and books, I should have made my nature
large enough to bear the loss of a single passion. But in solitude
we shri