they were not to him matters of deep feeling; but
the moment that they really moved him, he felt absolutely dumb and
tongue-tied.

He established himself at Windlow, and became at once aware that his
aunt perceived that there was something amiss. She gave him
opportunities of speaking to her, but he could not take them. He shrank
with a painful dumbness from displaying his secret wound. It seemed to
him undignified and humiliating to confess his weakness. He hoped
vaguely that the situation would solve itself, and spare him the
necessity of a confession.

He tried to occupy himself in his book, but in vain. Now that he was
confronted with a real and urgent dilemma, the origins of religion
seemed to him to have no meaning or interest. He did not feel that they
had any bearing whatever upon life; and his pain seemed to infect all
his perceptions. The quality of beauty in common things, the
hill-shapes, the colour of field and wood, the lights of dawn and eve,
the sailing cloud, the tints of weathered stone, the old house in its
embowered garden, with the pure green lines of the down above, had no
charm or significance for him any more. Again and again he said to
himself, "How beautiful that would be, if I could but feel it to be
so!" He saw, as clearly and critically as ever, the pleasant forms and
hues and groupings of things, but it was dull and savourless, while all
the attractive ideas that sprang up like flowers in his mind, the happy
trains of thought, in which some single fancy ramified and extended
itself into unsuspected combinations and connections, these all seemed
hardly worth recognising or pursuing. He found himself listless and
distracted, just able by an effort to talk, to listen, to exchange
thoughts, but utterly without any zest or energy.

Jack had gone off for a short visit, and Howard was thus left mostly
alone. He went once or twice to the Vicarage, but found Mr. Sandys an
unmixed trial; there seemed something wholly puerile about his absurd
energies and activities. The only boon of his society was that he
expected no reply to his soliloquies. Maud was there too, a distant
graceful figure; but she, too, seemed to have withdrawn into her own
thoughts, and their talk was mostly formal. Yet he was painfully and
acutely conscious of her presence. She, too, seemed to be clouded and
sad. He found himself unable to talk to her unconstrainedly. He could
only dumbly watch her; she appeared to avert her eye