e to be?
On the other hand, how could he formally ask for a private conversation
with Minola without stirring all manner of absurd curiosity and
conjecture? At the very least, Mary Blanchet would be sure to ask, when
he had gone, what he had come to say; and that would, under the
circumstances, be rather embarrassing for Minola. He gave up,
therefore, the idea of seeing Miss Grey at her own house.

Another plan at once occurred to him. He knew how often Minola walked
in Regent's Park--he would go and walk there about the time which she
usually chose, and he would go again and again until he met her. So he
started off for the Park, greatly relieved in mind to be doing
anything. All the time there was a good deal of work on his account
which he might and, if he were at all a sensible young man, would have
been doing. The time that he was spending in trying to ward off from
Minola a supposed danger might, if properly used, have procured him an
interview with a Cabinet Minister, or paved the way for easy success at
the future election for Keeton. There were twenty things which Mr.
Money had often told him he must do if he would have the faintest hope
of any success in anything; and all these things he was utterly
neglecting because he chose to think that he was called on to give some
advice to a girl who perhaps would repay him with but little thanks for
his officious attempt at interference.

He walked slowly through the park, along the paths which he knew that
she loved, and made for the canal. It was a soft, gray day, with no sky
seen. The air was surcharged with moisture; but it was not raining, and
the grass was only as if a heavy dew had settled on it. The soft breath
that floated over the fields was warm and languid. Only three colors
were to be seen all across the park: the green of the grass, the gray
of the clouds, or of the one cloud rather, and the dull black of the
tree-trunks. These colors indeed were softened, and shaded away, and
blended into each other, with indefinable varieties of tone and
delicate interchanges of effect. It was just the day to make a certain
class of observer curse the stupid and foggy monotony of the English
climate. It was the day, too, to gladden the heart of a certain refined
class of artist with whom delicate effects of tone and shade are
precious and familiar. Certainly it might be called a day of poetic
atmosphere. To Victor, who had long been used to the unwinking
steadiness of