er dark eyes clouded with tears. The
sight produced an extraordinary effect on a man large-hearted and
simple, for whom women still moved in an atmosphere of romance. His
heart leaped within him as she let herself be talked with and comforted.
And when her delicate hand rested in his as they said good-bye, he was
conscious of feelings--wild, tumultuous feelings--to which, in his walk
homeward through the spring glades of the park, he gave
impetuous course.

Romantic, indeed, the position was, for romance rests on contrast.
Jacob, who knew Julie Le Breton's secret, was thrilled or moved by the
contrasts of her existence at every turn. Her success and her
subjection; the place in Lady Henry's circle which Lady Henry had, in
the first instance, herself forced her to take, contrasted with the
shifts and evasions, the poor, tortuous ways by which, alas! she must
often escape Lady Henry's later jealousy; her intellectual strength and
her most feminine weaknesses; these things stirred and kept up in Jacob
a warm and passionate pity. The more clearly he saw the specks in her
glory, the more vividly did she appear to him a princess in distress,
bound by physical or moral fetters not of her own making. None of the
well-born, well-trained damsels who had been freely thrown across his
path had so far beguiled him in the least. Only this woman of doubtful
birth and antecedents, lonely, sad, and enslaved amid what people called
her social triumphs, stole into his heart--beautified by what he chose
to consider her misfortunes, and made none the less attractive by the
fact that as he pursued, she retreated; as he pressed, she grew cold.

When, indeed, after their friendship had lasted about a year, he
proposed to her and she refused him, his passion, instead of cooling,
redoubled. It never occurred to him to think that she had done a strange
thing from the worldly point of view--that would have involved an
appreciation of himself, as a prize in the marriage market, he would
have loathed to make. But he was one of the men for whom resistance
enhances the value of what they desire, and secretly he said to himself,
"Persevere!" When he was repelled or puzzled by certain aspects of her
character, he would say to himself:

"It is because she is alone and miserable. Women are not meant to be
alone. What soft, helpless creatures they are!--even when intellectually
they fly far ahead of us. If she would but put her hand in mine I would
so s