-existent.

Again and again he gave thanks for his own escape; he had been set free
from a life of vice and sin and folly, from all the dangers and illusions
that are most dreaded by the wise. He laughed as he remembered what would
be the common view of the situation. An ordinary lover would suffer all
the sting of sorrow and contempt; there would be grief for a lost
mistress, and rage at her faithlessness, and hate in the heart; one
foolish passion driving on another, and driving the man to ruin. For what
would be commonly called the real woman he now cared nothing; if he had
heard that she had died in her farm in Utter Gwent, he would have
experienced only a passing sorrow, such as he might feel at the death of
any one he had once known. But he did not think of the young farmer's
wife as the real Annie; he did not think of the frost-bitten leaves in
winter as the real rose. Indeed, the life of many reminded him of the
flowers; perhaps more especially of those flowers which to all appearance
are for many years but dull and dusty clumps of green, and suddenly, in
one night, burst into the flame of blossom, and fill all the misty lawns
with odor; till the morning. It was in that night that the flower lived,
not through the long unprofitable years; and, in like manner, many human
lives, he thought, were born in the evening and dead before the coming of
day. But he had preserved the precious flower in all its glory, not
suffering it to wither in the hard light, but keeping it in a secret
place, where it could never be destroyed. Truly now, and for the first
time, he possessed Annie, as a man possesses the gold which he has dug
from the rock and purged of its baseness.

He was musing over these things when a piece of news, very strange and
unexpected, arrived at the rectory. A distant, almost a mythical
relative, known from childhood as "Cousin Edward in the Isle of Wight,"
had died, and by some strange freak had left Lucian two thousand pounds.
It was a pleasure to give his father five hundred pounds, and the rector
on his side forgot for a couple of days to lean his head on his hand.
From the rest of the capital, which was well invested, Lucian found he
would derive something between sixty and seventy pounds a year, and his
old desires for literature and a refuge in the murmuring streets returned
to him. He longed to be free from the incantations that surrounded him in
the country, to work and live in a new atmosphere; an