e stood in his dressing-gown. "This is
life!" He did not know whether Grace was awake or not, and he would not
turn his head to ascertain. "Ah, fool," he went on to himself, "to
clip your own wings when you were free to soar!...But I could not rest
till I had done it. Why do I never recognize an opportunity till I
have missed it, nor the good or ill of a step till it is
irrevocable!...I fell in love....Love, indeed!--

"'Love's but the frailty of the mind
When 'tis not with ambition joined;
A sickly flame which if not fed, expires,
And feeding, wastes in self-consuming fires!'

Ah, old author of 'The Way of the World,' you knew--you knew!" Grace
moved. He thought she had heard some part of his soliloquy. He was
sorry--though he had not taken any precaution to prevent her.

He expected a scene at breakfast, but she only exhibited an extreme
reserve. It was enough, however, to make him repent that he should
have done anything to produce discomfort; for he attributed her manner
entirely to what he had said. But Grace's manner had not its cause
either in his sayings or in his doings. She had not heard a single word
of his regrets. Something even nearer home than her husband's blighted
prospects--if blighted they were--was the origin of her mood, a mood
that was the mere continuation of what her father had noticed when he
would have preferred a passionate jealousy in her, as the more natural.

She had made a discovery--one which to a girl of honest nature was
almost appalling. She had looked into her heart, and found that her
early interest in Giles Winterborne had become revitalized into
luxuriant growth by her widening perceptions of what was great and
little in life. His homeliness no longer offended her acquired tastes;
his comparative want of so-called culture did not now jar on her
intellect; his country dress even pleased her eye; his exterior
roughness fascinated her. Having discovered by marriage how much that
was humanly not great could co-exist with attainments of an exceptional
order, there was a revulsion in her sentiments from all that she had
formerly clung to in this kind: honesty, goodness, manliness,
tenderness, devotion, for her only existed in their purity now in the
breasts of unvarnished men; and here was one who had manifested them
towards her from his youth up.

There was, further, that never-ceasing pity in her soul for Giles as a
man whom she had wronged--a man w