n proportion as the influence of these days and weeks brought peace
and calm to Christine, to Noel they brought an excited restlessness.
He was under the spell of the strongest feeling that he had ever known.
All the circumstances of his intercourse with Christine, the difficult
self-repression to which he had compelled himself so long, and the
sudden sense of her freedom which made vigilance harder still--all these
things together brought about in him a state of excitement that kept
him continually on a strain. It was only in her presence that he was
calm, because it was there that he recognized most fully the absolute
need of calmness and self-control. Away from her, he sometimes rushed
into rash resolves, as to a resolute manly sort of wooing which he
felt tremendously impelled to, and in which he felt a power in him to
succeed. He would even make deliberate plans, and imagine himself going
to the house and insisting on seeing Christine alone, and then his
thoughts would fairly fly along, uttering themselves in excited words
that burned their way to Christine's heart and melted it.

But when, in actuality, he would come to where she was, all these brave
and manful purposes faded, like mist, before the commanding spell of her
deep and solemn calm. She seemed so tranquil in her assured sense of his
simple friendliness that he often thought she must have forgotten
entirely, in the excitement that followed, that he had offered her his
heart and hand and name, or else that she was so convinced of the fact
that it had been done in pity that she had never given it a second
thought.

So perplexed, bewildered, overwrought did he become with all these
thoughts that he forced himself to make some excuse and stay away from
Christine. When at last he went again, it was late in the evening and
his time, he knew, would be short. It was three days now since he had
been, and his blood flowed quick with impatience. He had thought of
little else as he sat through the long dinner, eating the dishes set
before him while he talked with a certain preoccupation to the beautiful
_debutante_ whom he had brought in, and who made herself her most
fascinating for him, Noel being just the sort of man to represent such a
girl's ideal--older, graver, more finished in manner than herself, and
possessed of the still greater charm of being thoroughly initiated in
all the mysteries of the great world, across whose threshold only she
had seen. She was