ieved, indeed, there was war between us. The
brief happiness of yesterday was clouded over and gone, and I thought
that never since the day of the first separation had I felt so
exquisitely unhappy as now, when the bitterness of quarrel was added to
the pangs of parting, and I stood not only alone but friendless. In the
course of one year's constant intimacy I had come to regard Lambert with
a reverence and affection which I had never before felt for any mortal
man except my dearest Harry. That his face should be turned from me
in anger was as if the sun had gone out of my sphere, and all was dark
around me. And yet I felt sure that in withdrawing the hasty promise I
had made not to see Theo, I was acting rightly--that my fidelity to her,
as hers now to me, was paramount to all other ties of duty or obedience,
and that, ceremony or none, I was hers, first and before all. Promises
were passed between us, from which no parent could absolve either; and
all the priests in Christendom could no more than attest and confirm the
sacred contract which had tacitly been ratified between us.

I saw Jack Lambert by chance that day, as I went mechanically to my not
unusual haunt, the library of the new Museum; and with the impetuousness
of youth, and eager to impart my sorrow to some one, I took him out of
the room and led him about the gardens, and poured out my grief to him.
I did not much care for Jack (who in truth was somewhat of a prig, and
not a little pompous and wearisome with his Latin quotations) except in
the time of my own sorrow, when I would fasten upon him or any one; and
having suffered himself in his affair with the little American,
being haud ignarus mali (as I knew he would say), I found the college
gentleman ready to compassionate another's misery. I told him, what has
here been represented at greater length, of my yesterday's meeting
with his sister; of my interview with his father in the morning; of my
determination at all hazards never to part with Theo. When I found from
the various quotations from the Greek and Latin authors which he uttered
that he leaned to my side in the dispute, I thought him a man of great
sense, clung eagerly to his elbow, and bestowed upon him much more
affection than he was accustomed at other times to have from me. I
walked with him up to his father's lodgings in Dean Street; saw him
enter at the dear door; surveyed the house from without with a sickening
desire to know from its exte