worms, be forgotten and come to earth, and grow up
a mere blade of churchyard-grass and an ivy leaf. Then, Miss Graye, when
I see you are a Lovely Nothing, I pity you, and the love I feel then
is better and sounder, larger and more lasting than that I felt at the
beginning.' Again an ardent flash of his handsome eyes.

It was by this route that he ventured on an indirect declaration and
offer of his hand.

She implied in the same indirect manner that she did not love him enough
to accept it.

An actual refusal was more than he had expected. Cursing himself for
what he called his egregious folly in making himself the slave of a mere
lady's attendant, and for having given the parish, should they know
of her refusal, a chance of sneering at him--certainly a ground for
thinking less of his standing than before--he went home to the Old
House, and walked indecisively up and down his back-yard. Turning aside,
he leant his arms upon the edge of the rain-water-butt standing in the
corner, and looked into it. The reflection from the smooth stagnant
surface tinged his face with the greenish shades of Correggio's nudes.
Staves of sunlight slanted down through the still pool, lighting it
up with wonderful distinctness. Hundreds of thousands of minute living
creatures sported and tumbled in its depth with every contortion that
gaiety could suggest; perfectly happy, though consisting only of a head,
or a tail, or at most a head and a tail, and all doomed to die within
the twenty-four hours.

'Damn my position! Why shouldn't I be happy through my little day too?
Let the parish sneer at my repulses, let it. I'll get her, if I move
heaven and earth to do it!'

Indeed, the inexperienced Cytherea had, towards Edward in the first
place, and Manston afterwards, unconsciously adopted bearings that would
have been the very tactics of a professional fisher of men who wished
to have them each successively dangling at her heels. For if any rule
at all can be laid down in a matter which, for men collectively, is
notoriously beyond regulation, it is that to snub a petted man, and to
pet a snubbed man, is the way to win in suits of both kinds. Manston
with Springrove's encouragement would have become indifferent. Edward
with Manston's repulses would have sheered off at the outset, as he did
afterwards. Her supreme indifference added fuel to Manston's ardour--it
completely disarmed his pride. The invulnerable Nobody seemed greater to
him than