t, and still had remained gracious, and
kind, and womanly! 'I should be a hard-hearted brute,' he said to
himself, 'if I did not feel a very deep and peculiar interest in her--if
I did not desire that Marie's friendship should abundantly make up to her
for my blundering!'

Did he ever really deceive himself into imagining that this was all? It
is difficult to say. The mind of a man no longer young, and trained in
all the subtleties of thought, does not deal with an invading sentiment
exactly as a youth would do with all his experience to come. It steals
upon him more slowly, he is capable of disguising it to himself longer,
of escaping from it into other interests. Passion is in its ultimate
essence the same, wherever it appears and under whatever conditions, but
it possesses itself of human life in different ways. Slowly, and
certainly, the old primeval fire, the commonest, fatalest, divinest force
of life, was making its way into Kendal's nature. But it was making its
way against antagonistic forces of habit, tradition, self-restraint,--it
found a hundred other interests in possession;--it had a strange
impersonality and timidity of nature to fight with. Kendal had been
accustomed to live in other men's lives. Was he only just beginning to
live his own?

But, however it was, he was at least conscious during this waiting time
that life was full of some hidden savour; that his thoughts were never
idle, never vacant; that, as he lay flat among the fern in his moments of
rest, following the march of the clouds as they sailed divinely over the
rich breadth and colour of the commons, a whole brood of images nestled
at his heart, or seemed to hover in the sunny air before him,--visions
of a slender form fashioned with Greek suppleness and majesty, of a soft
and radiant presence, of looks all womanliness, and gestures all grace,
of a smile like no other he had ever seen for charm, of a quick impulsive
gait! He followed that figure through scene after scene; he saw primroses
in its hand, and the pale spring blue above it; he recalled it standing
tense and still with blanched cheek and fixed appealing eye, while all
round the June woods murmured in the breeze; he surrounded it in
imagination with the pomp and circumstance of the stage, and realised it
as a centre of emotion to thousands. And then from memories he would pass
on to speculations, from the scenes he knew to those he could only guess
at, from the life of which he h