himself, it depended on certain fundamental facts in his own
nature--it was in keeping with his deepest character. He had an inbred
love of the difficult, the unconventional in life, of all that piqued
and stimulated his own superabundant consciousness of resource and
power. And he had a tenderness of feeling, a gift of chivalrous pity,
only known to the few, which was in truth always hungrily on the watch,
like some starved faculty that cannot find its outlet. The thought of
this beautiful child, in the hands of such a mother as Madame d'Estrees,
and rushing upon risks illustrated by the half-mocking attentions of
Geoffrey Cliffe, did in truth wring his heart. With a strange
imaginative clearness he foresaw her future, he beheld her the prey at
once of some bad fellow and of her own temperament. She would come to
grief; he saw the prescience of it in her already; and what a waste
would be there!

No!--he would step in--capture her before these ways and whims, now
merely bizarre or foolish, stiffened into what might in truth destroy
her. His pulse quickened as he thought of the development of this
beauty, the ripening of this intelligence. Never yet had he seen a girl
whom he much wished to marry. He was easily repelled by stupidity, still
more by mere amiability. Some touch of acid, of roughness in the
fruit--that drew him, in politics, thought, love. And if she married him
he vowed to himself, proudly, that she would find him no tyrant. Many a
man might marry her who would then fight her and try to break her. All
that was most fastidious and characteristic in Ashe revolted from such a
notion. With him she should have <i>freedom</i>--whatever it might cost. He
asked himself deliberately, whether after marriage he could see her
flirting with other men, as she had flirted that day with Cliffe, and
still refrain from coercing her. And his question was answered, or
rather put aside, first by the confidence of nascent love--he would love
her so well and so loyally that she would naturally turn to him for
counsel; and then by the clear perception that she was a creature of
mind rather than sense, governed mainly by the caprices and curiosities
of the <i>intelligence</i>, combined with a rather cold, indifferent
temperament. One moment throwing herself wildly into a dangerous or
exciting intimacy, the next, parting with a laugh, and without a
regret--it was thus he saw her in the future, even as a wife. "She may
scandalize ha