she were
about to speak again; but checked herself, and merely looked at me for
an instant. In that instant, however, the smile left her face, and the
grave, anxious expression came again. She went out softly. A few minutes
afterwards the roll of the carriage which took her and her companion
to the ball, died away heavily on my ear. I was left alone in the
house--alone for the night.

VIII.

My manuscript lay before me, set in order by Clara's careful hand.
I slowly turned over the leaves one by one; but my eye only fell
mechanically on the writing. Yet one day since, and how much ambition,
how much hope, how many of my heart's dearest sensations and my mind's
highest thoughts dwelt in those poor paper leaves, in those
little crabbed marks of pen and ink! Now I could look on them
indifferently--almost as a stranger would have looked. The days of calm
study, of steady toil of thought, seemed departed for ever. Stirring
ideas; store of knowledge patiently heaped up; visions of better sights
than this world can show, falling freshly and sunnily over the pages
of my first book; all these were past and gone--withered up by the
hot breath of the senses--doomed by a paltry fate, whose germ was the
accident of an idle day!

I hastily put the manuscript aside. My unexpected interview with Clara
had calmed the turbulent sensations of the evening: but the fatal
influence of the dark beauty remained with me still. How could I write?

I sat down at the open window. It was at the back of the house, and
looked out on a strip of garden--London garden--a close-shut dungeon for
nature, where stunted trees and drooping flowers seemed visibly pining
for the free air and sunlight of the country, in their sooty atmosphere,
amid their prison of high brick walls. But the place gave room for the
air to blow in it, and distanced the tumult of the busy streets. The
moon was up, shined round tenderly by a little border-work of pale
yellow light. Elsewhere, the awful void of night was starless; the dark
lustre of space shone without a cloud.

A presentiment arose within me, that in this still and solitary hour
would occur my decisive, my final struggle with myself. I felt that my
heart's life or death was set on the hazard of the night.

This new love that was in me; this giant sensation of a day's growth,
was first love. Hitherto, I had been heart-whole. I had known nothing
of the passion, which is the absorbing passion of humanity. No wom