e hours of
the evening before, and embodying for him the manifold changes of
feeling which had marked the time. He saw himself as well as Cecily, and
the approval of his eyes was still for himself, their irritation for
her. But he could not dismiss her from the pictures; he realized this
with a new annoyance. He lay later than his custom was, looking at her,
recalling what she had said as he found the need of words to write
beneath each mental apparition. Under the irritation, and greater than
it, was the same sort of satisfaction that his activities had given
him--a feeling of more life and broader; this thing, though rising out
of the old life, fitted in well with the new. Above all, that sentence
of hers rang in his head, its extravagance perhaps gaining pre-eminence
for it: "If ever the time comes, I shall remember!" The time did not
seem likely to come--so far as he could interpret the vague and rather
threadbare phrase--but her resolution stirred his interest, and ended by
exacting his applause. He was glad that she had resisted, and had not
allowed herself to be trampled on. Though the threat was very empty, its
utterance showed a high spirit, such a spirit as he still wished to
preside over Blent. It was just what his mother might have said, with an
equal intensity of determination and an equal absence of definite
purpose. But then the whole proceedings had been just what he could
imagine his mother bringing about. Consequently he was rather blind to
the extraordinary character of the step Cecily had taken; so far he was
of the same clay as his cousin. He was, however, none the less outraged
by it, and none the less sure that he had met it in the right way. Yet
he did not consider that there was any quarrel between them, and he
meant to see more of her; he was accustomed to "scenes" occurring and
leaving no permanent estrangement or bitterness; the storms blew over
the sand, but they did not in the end make much difference in the sand.

There was work to be done--the first grave critical bit of work he had
ever had to do, the first real measuring of himself against an opponent
of proved ability. So he would think no more about the girl. This
resolve did not work. She, or rather her apparition, seemed to insist
that she had something to do with the work, was concerned in it, or at
least meant to look on at it. Harry found that he had small objection,
or even a sort of welcome for her presence. Side by side with th