ow valley, the sides of which obscured the sky to an
angle of perhaps thirty or forty degrees above the mathematical horizon,
he was obliged to suspend his judgment till he was in possession of
further knowledge, having however assumed in the interim, that the fire
was somewhere between Carriford Road Station and the village.

The self-same glare had just arrested the eyes of another man. He was
at that minute gliding along several miles to the east of the steward's
position, but nearing the same point as that to which Manston tended.
The younger Edward Springrove was returning from London to his father's
house by the identical train which the steward was expecting to bring
his wife, the truth being that Edward's lateness was owing to the
simplest of all causes, his temporary want of money, which led him to
make a slow journey for the sake of travelling at third-class fare.

Springrove had received Cytherea's bitter and admonitory letter, and he
was clearly awakened to a perception of the false position in which
he had placed himself, by keeping silence at Budmouth on his long
engagement. An increasing reluctance to put an end to those few days of
ecstasy with Cytherea had overruled his conscience, and tied his tongue
till speaking was too late.

'Why did I do it? how could I dream of loving her?' he asked himself as
he walked by day, as he tossed on his bed by night: 'miserable folly!'

An impressionable heart had for years--perhaps as many as six or seven
years--been distracting him, by unconsciously setting itself to yearn
for somebody wanting, he scarcely knew whom. Echoes of himself, though
rarely, he now and then found. Sometimes they were men, sometimes women,
his cousin Adelaide being one of these; for in spite of a fashion which
pervades the whole community at the present day--the habit of exclaiming
that woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse, the fact remains that,
after all, women are Mankind, and that in many of the sentiments of life
the difference of sex is but a difference of degree.

But the indefinable helpmate to the remoter sides of himself still
continued invisible. He grew older, and concluded that the ideas, or
rather emotions, which possessed him on the subject, were probably too
unreal ever to be found embodied in the flesh of a woman. Thereupon,
he developed a plan of satisfying his dreams by wandering away to the
heroines of poetical imagination, and took no further thought on the
earth