ke a difference in ideals, and the added demands of
middle-age in physical form are more than balanced by its concessions
as to the spiritual content. He looked at himself in the glass, and
felt glad at those inner deficiencies in Avice which formerly would have
impelled him to reject her.

There was a strange difference in his regard of his present folly and of
his love in his youthful time. Now he could be mad with method, knowing
it to be madness: then he was compelled to make believe his madness
wisdom. In those days any flash of reason upon his loved one's
imperfections was blurred over hastily and with fear. Such penetrative
vision now did not cool him. He knew he was the creature of a tendency;
and passively acquiesced.

To use a practical eye, it appeared that, as he had once thought, this
Caro family--though it might not for centuries, or ever, furbish up
an individual nature which would exactly, ideally, supplement his own
imperfect one and round with it the perfect whole--was yet the only
family he had ever met, or was likely to meet, which possessed the
materials for her making. It was as if the Caros had found the clay but
not the potter, while other families whose daughters might attract him
had found the potter but not the clay.

2. VIII. HIS OWN SOUL CONFRONTS HIM

From his roomy castle and its grounds and the cliffs hard by he could
command every move and aspect of her who was the rejuvenated Spirit
of the Past to him--in the effulgence of whom all sordid details were
disregarded.

Among other things he observed that she was often anxious when it
rained. If, after a wet day, a golden streak appeared in the sky over
Deadman's Bay, under a lid of cloud, her manner was joyous and her tread
light.

This puzzled him; and he found that if he endeavoured to encounter her
at these times she shunned him--stealthily and subtly, but unmistakably.
One evening, when she had left her cottage and tripped off in the
direction of the under-hill townlet, he set out by the same route,
resolved to await her return along the high roadway which stretched
between that place and East Quarriers.

He reached the top of the old road where it makes a sudden descent to
the townlet, but she did not appear. Turning back, he sauntered along
till he had nearly reached his own house again. Then he retraced his
steps, and in the dim night he walked backwards and forwards on the
bare and lofty convex of the isle; the stars