Humphrey Hyde--"

But she flung away from me at that with a sudden movement of
amazement and indignation and hurt, which cut me to the quick.
"Yes," she said, "yes, Master Wingfield, truly I believe that Sir
Humphrey Hyde would do me any service that came in his way, and
truly he is a brave lad. I have a great esteem for Humphrey--I
have a greater esteem for Humphrey than for all the rest--and I
care not if you know it, Master Wingfield."

So saying she called to the bearers of her chair, and would have a
slave assist her to it instead of me, and rode in silence the rest
of the way, I following, walking my horse, who pulled hard at his
bits.

XIII

It was dawn before we were abed, but I for one had no sleep, being
strained to such a pitch of rapture and pain by what I had
discovered. The will I had not, to take the joy which I seemed to
see before me like some brimming cup of the gods, but not yet, in
the first surprise of knowing it offered me, the will to avoid the
looking upon it, and the tasting of it in dreams. Over and over I
said to myself, and every time with a new strengthening of
resolution, that Mary Cavendish should not love me, and that in some
way I would force her to obey me in that as in other things, never
doubting that I could do so. Well I knew that she could not wed a
convict, nor could I clear myself unless at the expense of her
sister Catherine, and sure I was that she would not purchase love
itself at such a cost as that. There remained nothing but to turn
her fancy from me, and that seemed to me an easy task, she being but
a child, and having, I reasoned, but little more than a childish
first love for me, which, as every one knows, doth readily burn
itself out by its excess of wick, and lack of substantial fuel. And
yet, as I lay on my bed with the red dawn at the windows, and the
birds calling outside, and the scent of the opening blossoms
entering invisible, such pangs of joy and ecstasy beyond anything
which I had ever known on earth overwhelmed me that I could not
resist them. Knowing well that in the end I should prove my
strength, for the time I gave myself to that advance of man before
the spur of love, which I doubt not is after the same fashion as the
unfolding of the flowers in the spring, and the nesting of the
birds, and the movement of the world itself from season to season,
and would be as uncontrollable were it not that a man is mightier
even than that to which he o