deed, she could do with me what
she wished.

But why had she suddenly given me up? Had she tired of me, exhausted me,
wrung my mind dry of interest; and flung me by like a squeezed orange? I
lay in wait for her in the passages that I might speak to her, but she
seemed never to be alone any more. I would lurk in her path for hours,
only to be rewarded by the sight of her dress vanishing in another
direction. I wrote her notes, to none of which would she reply. "If a
woman flies, she flies to be pursued," I had heard all my life. Elusive,
mocking goddess that she was, I felt every day more and more ardent in
my pursuit, yet I rarely saw her now except at breakfast, when she was
demure, a little weary, and altogether indifferent to me. I determined
to follow her into society.

It was early in July now, and the watering-place life was at its gayest.
I had hitherto accepted no invitations, from respect for the habits of
the house where I was staying, but now I examined with interest every
card and note brought to me. Accordingly, I set out on a round of
pleasure-seeking, which soon transformed me from a boy whose foolish aim
in life was to be as clever as other men into an impassioned lover.
Other men may look back upon their first love with a certain pleasing
sentimentality: in spite of all the years that now lie between me and
the fever of those few months at The Headlands, I still suffer bitterly
from the recollection of that time.

CHAPTER XVIII.

I had gone with Georgina to a picnic one day at her request, meeting her
at the house of Mrs. Woodruff, with whom she was staying for a
fortnight, at the Point. The picnic meant merely a drive for miles back
into the country and a lunch in the woods prepared by a French cook, but
it was a delightful road through shadows of tall forest trees, the glare
of sunlight alternating with green copsewood coolness. They were cutting
the grass and clover in the fields, and the air was fresh with the scent
of new-mown hay: half the land on either side of us was covered with
ripening grain, and the light breeze that played perpetually over it
gave us endless shimmerings and glimmerings of wonderful light almost as
beautiful as the tints that play over the sea.

I had every need to find the beauty of the summer gracious to me that
day. It was but another of many days when every throb of my feeling for
Georgy Lenox became an anguish hard to bear. She was opposite me as we
rode t