equences on his own future in the presence of
another's misfortune, sorrow, or death? The expected promotion or
legacy is the common type of a temptation which makes speech and even
prayer a severe avoidance of the most insistent thoughts, and sometimes
raises an inward shame, a self-distaste that is worse than any other
form of unpleasant companionship. In Rex's nature the shame was
immediate, and overspread like an ugly light all the hurrying images of
what might come, which thrust themselves in with the idea that
Gwendolen was again free--overspread them, perhaps, the more
persistently because every phantasm of a hope was quickly nullified by
a more substantial obstacle. Before the vision of "Gwendolen free" rose
the impassable vision of "Gwendolen rich, exalted, courted;" and if in
the former time, when both their lives were fresh, she had turned from
his love with repugnance, what ground was there for supposing that her
heart would be more open to him in the future?

These thoughts, which he wanted to master and suspend, were like a
tumultuary ringing of opposing chimes that he could not escape from by
running. During the last year he had brought himself into a state of
calm resolve, and now it seemed that three words had been enough to
undo all that difficult work, and cast him back into the wretched
fluctuations of a longing which he recognized as simply perturbing and
hopeless. And at this moment the activity of such longing had an
untimeliness that made it repulsive to his better self. Excuse poor
Rex; it was not much more than eighteen months since he had been laid
low by an archer who sometimes touches his arrow with a subtle,
lingering poison. The disappointment of a youthful passion has effects
as incalculable as those of small-pox which may make one person plain
and a genius, another less plain and more foolish, another plain
without detriment to his folly, and leave perhaps the majority without
obvious change. Everything depends--not on the mere fact of
disappointment, but--on the nature affected and the force that stirs
it. In Rex's well-endowed nature, brief as the hope had been, the
passionate stirring had gone deep, and the effect of disappointment was
revolutionary, though fraught with a beneficent new order which
retained most of the old virtues; in certain respects he believed that
it had finally determined the bias and color of his life. Now, however,
it seemed that his inward peace was hardly mor