uming them to feel as they appeared to feel, with their commerce and
their politics, their glasses and their pipes. They had got past the
distracting currents of passionateness, and were in the calm waters of
middle-aged philosophy. But he, their contemporary, was tossed like a
cork hither and thither upon the crest of every fancy, precisely as he
had been tossed when he was half his present age, with the burden now of
double pain to himself in his growing vision of all as vanity.

Avice had gone, and he saw her no more that day. Since he could not
again call upon her, she was as inaccessible as if she had entered the
military citadel on the hill-top beyond them.

In the evening he went out and paced down the lane to the Red King's
castle overhanging the cliff, beside whose age the castle he occupied
was but a thing of yesterday. Below the castle precipice lay enormous
blocks, which had fallen from it, and several of them were carved over
with names and initials. He knew the spot and the old trick well, and
by searching in the faint moon-rays he found a pair of names which, as
a boy, he himself had cut. They were 'AVICE' and 'JOCELYN'--Avice Caro's
and his own. The letters were now nearly worn away by the weather and
the brine. But close by, in quite fresh letters, stood 'ANN AVICE,'
coupled with the name 'ISAAC.' They could not have been there more than
two or three years, and the 'Ann Avice' was probably Avice the Second.
Who was Isaac? Some boy admirer of her child-time doubtless.

He retraced his steps, and passed the Caros' house towards his own. The
revivified Avice animated the dwelling, and the light within the room
fell upon the window. She was just inside that blind.

* * *

Whenever she unexpectedly came to the castle he started, and lost
placidity. It was not at her presence as such, but at the new condition,
which seemed to have something sinister in it. On the other hand, the
most abrupt encounter with him moved her to no emotion as it had
moved her prototype in the old days. She was indifferent to, almost
unconscious of, his propinquity. He was no more than a statue to her;
she was a growing fire to him.

A sudden Sapphic terror of love would ever and anon come upon the
sculptor, when his matured reflecting powers would insist upon
informing him of the fearful lapse from reasonableness that lay in this
infatuation. It threw him into a sweat. What if now, at l