t and undenied, whatever might be the general opinion
as to her effect upon his heart. Some of Kitty's intimates at any rate
were convinced that his absorption in the matter was by now, to say the
least, no less eager and persistent than hers. At this point it was by
no means still a relation of flattery on Kitty's side and a pleased
self-love on his. It had become a duel of two personalities, or rather
two imaginations. In fact, as Kitty, learning the ways of his character,
became more proudly mistress of herself and him, his interest in her
visibly increased. It might almost be said that she was beginning to
hold back, and he for the first time pursued.

Once or twice he had the grace to ask himself where it was all to end.
Was he in love with her? An absurd question! He had paid his heavy
tribute to passion if any man ever had, and had already hung up his
votive tablet and his garments wet from shipwreck in the temple of the
god. But it seemed that, after all said and done, the society of a
woman, young, beautiful, and capricious, was still the best thing which
the day--the London day, at all events--had to bring. At Kitty's
suggestion he was collecting and revising a new volume of his poems. He
and she quarrelled over them perpetually. Sometimes there was not a line
which pleased her; and then, again, she would delight him with the
homage of sudden tears in her brown eyes, and a praise so ardent and so
refined that it almost compared--as Kitty meant it should--with that of
the dead. In the shaded drawing-room, where every detail pleased his
taste, Cliffe's harsh voice thundered or murmured verse which was
beyond dispute the verse of a poet, and thereby sensuous and
passionate. Ostensibly the verse concerned another woman; in truth, the
slight and lovely figure sitting on the farther side of the flowered
hearth, the delicate head bent, the finger-tips lightly joined, entered
day by day more directly into the consciousness of the poet. What harm?
All he asked was intelligence and response. As to her heart, he made no
claim upon it whatever. Ashe, by-the-way, was clearly not jealous--a
sensible attitude, considering Lady Kitty's strength of will.

Into Cliffe's feeling towards Ashe there entered, indeed, a number of
evil things, determined by quite other relations between the two
men--the relation of the man who wants to the man who has, of the man
beaten by the restlessness of ambition to the man who possesses all tha