e hills--when passion, pale but
triumphant, had held full sway--has never been forgiven by either. A
sense of terror has possessed Portia ever since--the knowledge of a
danger barely overcome; and with him there has been the memory of pain,
and terrible self-restraint that has scathed him as it passed him by.
And withal a settled coldness has fallen upon them, the greater because
of the weakness that had characterised the hour of which I write.

He does not condemn her, but in his heart he does not forgive her want
of faith, her almost openly avowed distrust. Of his own will he never
lets his eyes rest upon the fair beauty of her face, and turns aside
when unlucky chance has flung him in her path.

And she--a contempt for her own want of self-control, together with the
miserable knowledge that her heart is irrevocably his, has rendered her
almost repellent in her manner toward him. When he is near, her eyelids
droop, her lips take a harder curve, she is dumb, silent, unsympathetic;
and yet when he is gone, when the door has closed behind him, the fever
of her blood runs high, and but for social training, she would gladly
rise, and, in spite of all things, call to him and implore him to return
to her side once more.

To a casual observer, of course, all this is not apparent; but to these
two, between whom Fate sits relentless, the pain and sorrow of it is
deep and cruel. More deep, more sorrowful for him, of course. His whole
life is a ruin; he had thought of many things when first the blight fell
upon him; but that he should fall in love, and because of this curse
that has blasted his best days, should be compelled to turn aside from
the love of his heart, had not occurred to him. His life has grown too
bitter to be borne with fortitude, almost he is "half in love with
easeful death." Oh, the joy--the rapture! to pass away from all the
tortures of this "work-a-day world" to a land unknown, but surely full
of rest. To die--to disappear! To court a glad forgetfulness! In this
alone lies hope, and, that sweetest of all sweet things, indifference.

Not coward enough to compel death, he still longs for it; he would slip
away from all and sink into oblivion, and gladly deem himself and his
sad history forgotten. "To cease upon the midnight with no pain?" What
sweeter, kinder fate could visit him than that for which Keats
longed--not vainly.

Into his life, too, some smaller worries are thrown. The old man Slyme,
the secr