and decided refusal he
had received. He was like a soldier in his first battle who has got a
sharp wound which does not immediately cripple him, the perception of
which is lost in the enjoyment of a new, keen, and enthralling
experience. His thoughts were full of his own avowal, of the beauty of
his young mistress, rather than of her coldness. Seeing his riding-whip
in his hand, he stared at it an instant, and then at his boots, with a
sudden recollection that he had intended to ride. He walked rapidly to
the stable, where his horse was still waiting, and rode at a brisk trot
out of the avenue for a few blocks, and then struck off into a sandy
path that led to the woods by the river-side.

As he rode, his thoughts were at first more of himself than of Alice.
He exulted over the discovery that he was in love as if some great and
unimagined good fortune had happened to him. "I am not past it, then,"
he said to himself, repeating the phrase which had leaped from his
heart when he saw Alice descending the stairs. "I hardly thought that
such a thing could ever happen to me. She is the only one." His
thoughts ran back to a night in Heidelberg, when he sat in the shadow
of the castle wall with a German student of his acquaintance, and
looked far over the valley at the lights of the town and the rippling
waves of the Neckar, silvered by the soft radiance of the summer moon.

"Poor Hammerstein! How he raved that night about little Bertha von
Eichholz. He called her _Die Einzige_ something like a thousand times.
It seemed an absurd thing to say; I knew dozens just like her, with
blue eyes and Gretchen braids. But Hammerstein meant it, for he shot
himself the week after her wedding with the assessor. But mine _is_ the
Only One--though she is not mine. I would rather love her without hope
than be loved by any other woman in the world."

A few days before he had been made happy by perceiving that she was no
longer a child; now he took infinite pleasure in the thought of her
youth; he tilled his mind and his senses with the image of her
freshness, her clear, pure color, the outline of her face and form.
"She is young and fragrant as spring; she has every bloom and charm of
body and soul," he said to himself, as he galloped over the shady
woodland road. In his exalted mood, he had almost forgotten how he had
left her presence. He delighted in his own roused and wakened passion,
as a devotee in his devotions, without considering what