nge--as
people talk about falling in love with a woman--why, the next morning I
would have shaken myself free of it, as a Newfoundland dog shakes
himself free of the water. But a fever, a madness, that slowly gains on
you--and you look around and say it is nothing, but day after day it
burns more and more. And it is no longer something that you can look at
apart from yourself--it is your very self; and sometimes, Ogilvie, I
wonder whether it is all true, or whether it is mad I am altogether.
Newcastle--do you know Newcastle?"

"I have passed through it, of course," his companion said, more and more
amazed at the vehemence of his speech.

"It is there she is now--I have seen it in the papers; and it is
Newcastle--Newcastle--Newcastle--I am thinking of from morning till
night, and if I could only see one of the streets of it I should be
glad. They say it is smoky and grimy; I should be breathing sunlight if
I lived in the most squalid of all its houses. And they say she is going
to Liverpool, and to Manchester, and to Leeds; and it is as if my very
life were being drawn away from me. I try to think what people may be
around her; I try to imagine what she is doing at a particular hour of
the day; and I feel as if I were shut away in an island in the middle of
the Atlantic, with nothing but the sound of the waves around my ears.
Ogilvie, it is enough to drive a man out of his senses."

"But, look here, Macleod," said Ogilvie, pulling himself together; for
it was hard to resist the influence of this vehement and uncontrollable
passion--"look here, man; why don't you think of it in cold blood? Do
you expect me to sympathize with you as a friend? Or would you like to
know what any ordinary man of the world would think of the whole case?"

"Don't give me your advice, Ogilvie," said he, untwining and throwing
away the bit of casting-line that had cut his finger. "It is far beyond
that. Let me talk to you--that is all. I should have gone mad in another
week, if I had had no one to speak to; and as it is, what better am I
than mad? It is not anything to be analyzed and cured: it is my very
self; and what have I become?"

"But look here, Macleod--I want to ask you a question: would you marry
her?"

The common-sense of the younger man was re-asserting itself. This was
what any one--looking at the whole situation from the Aldershot point of
view--would at the outset demand? But if Macleod had known all that was
implied in the