as pacify. The wound was not heavy payment for
the rapture of having so incomparable a woman his own. He reflected
wonderingly on the husband, as he had previously done, and came again to
the conclusion that it was a poor creature, abjectly jealous of a
wife, he could neither master, nor equal, nor attract. And thinking
of jealousy, Dacier felt none; none of individuals, only of facts: her
marriage, her bondage. Her condemnation to perpetual widowhood angered
him, as at an unrighteous decree. The sharp sweet bloom of her beauty,
fresh in swarthiness, under the whipping Easter, cried out against that
loathed inhumanity. Or he made it cry.

Being a stranger to the jealousy of men, he took the soft assurance that
he was preferred above them all. Competitors were numerous: not any won
her eyes as he did. She revealed nothing of the same pleasures in
the shining of the others touched by her magical wand. Would she have
pardoned one of them the 'Diana!' bursting from his mouth?

She was not a woman for trifling, still less for secresy. He was as
little the kind of lover. Both would be ready to take up their burden,
if the burden was laid on them. Diana had thus far impressed him.

Meanwhile he faced the cathedral towers of the ancient Norman city,
standing up in the smoky hues of the West; and a sentence out of her
book seemed fitting to the scene and what he felt. He rolled it over
luxuriously as the next of delights to having her beside him.--She wrote
of; 'Thoughts that are bare dark outlines, coloured by some odd passion
of the soul, like towers of a distant city seen in the funeral waste of
day.'--His bluff English anti-poetic training would have caused him to
shrug at the stuff coming from another pen: he might condescendingly
have criticized it, with a sneer embalmed in humour. The words were
hers; she had written them; almost by a sort of anticipation, he
imagined; for he at once fell into the mood they suggested, and had
a full crop of the 'bare dark outlines' of thoughts coloured by his
particular form of passion.

Diana had impressed him powerfully when she set him swallowing and
assimilating a sentence ethereally thin in substance of mere sentimental
significance, that he would antecedently have read aloud in a
drawing-room, picking up the book by hazard, as your modern specimen of
romantic vapouring. Mr. Dacier however was at the time in observation of
the towers of Caen, fresh from her presence, animated to