was ever in peril of a shadow of loss in the hands of an English
gentleman,' and so forth, rather surprisingly to me, remembering her
off-hand manner of the foregoing day. But the sense of responsibility
thrown upon her ideas of our superior national dignity had awakened her
fervider naturalness--made her a different person, as we say when
accounting, in our fashion, for what a little added heat may do.

The half hour allotted to me fled. I went from the room and the house,
feeling that I had seen and heard her who was barely of the world of
humankind for me, so strongly did imagination fly with her. I kissed her
fingers, I gazed in her eyes, I heard the beloved voice. All passed too
swift for happiness. Recollections set me throbbing, but recollection
brought longing. She said, 'Now I have come I must see you, Harry.' Did
it signify that to see me was a piece of kindness at war with her
judgement? She rejoiced at my perfect recovery, though it robbed her of
the plea in extenuation of this step she had taken. She praised me for
abstaining to write to her, when I was stammering a set of
hastily-impressed reasons to excuse myself for the omission. She praised
my step into Parliament. It did not seem to involve a nearer approach to
her. She said, 'You have not wasted your time in England.' It was for my
solitary interests that she cared, then.

I brooded desperately. I could conceive an overlooking height that made
her utterance simple and consecutive: I could not reach it. Topics which
to me were palpitating, had no terror for her. She said, 'I have offended
my father; I have written to him; he will take me away.' In speaking of
the letter which had caused her to offend, she did not blame the writer.
I was suffered to run my eyes over it, and was ashamed. It read to me too
palpably as an outcry to delude and draw her hither:--pathos and pathos:
the father holding his dying son in his arms, his sole son, Harry
Richmond; the son set upon by enemies in the night: the lover never
daring to beg for a sight of his beloved ere he passed away:--not an
ill-worded letter; read uncritically, it may have been touching: it must
have been, though it was the reverse for me. I frowned, broke down in
regrets, under sharp humiliation.

She said, 'You knew nothing of it. A little transgression is the real
offender. When we are once out of the way traced for us, we are in danger
of offending at every step; we are as lawless as the outcast