nature of either of them
to be more intimately allied.

Rainham's indolent humour and fantastic melancholy, his genial
disregard of popularity or success, could not but be displeasing to
a man so precise and practical as the barrister. Only now she had
scented, had dimly perceived beneath his speech, something more than
the indefinable aversion of incompatible tempers, a very personal
and present dislike. Had things passed between them, things of which
she was ignorant? Was the sentiment, then, reciprocal? She hardly
believed it: Rainham's placid temper gave to his largest hostilities
the character merely of languid contempt; it was not worth the
trouble to hate anyone, he had said to her so often--neither to hate
nor to love. She could imagine him with infidelities on occasion to
the last part of his rule; yes, she could imagine that--but for
hatred, no! he had said rightly he was too indolent for that. It
must be all on one side, then, as happens so frequently in life with
love and hate, and the rest--all on one side. And the barrister had
risen to take his leave before her reflections had brought her
further than this.

CHAPTER XX

It must be admitted that when Lady Garnett insinuated, for the
benefit of her half-incredulous inward counsellor, that Charles
Sylvester, in spite of his almost aggressive panoply of
self-assurance, had been smitten by the fever of jealousy, she fully
sustained her reputation for perspicacity. Her conclusions were
seldom wrong, and, indeed, the barrister, although he had
professional motives for endeavouring to cloak himself with
something of the wisdom of the serpent, was characterized far more
by the somewhat stolid innocence of that proverbially moral, but
less interesting creature, the dove; and it was an easy task for a
keen observer, such as her ladyship undoubtedly was, to read him
line upon line, like the most clearly printed of books. As in the
case of a book, what one read was not always intelligible, and it
might even on occasion be necessary to read between the obvious
lines; but in this particular instance the page contained no
cryptogram, and the astute old lady had read it without her
spectacles.

Charles was jealous; he had not insulted himself by admitting it
even for an instant, but he was jealous; and his jealousy was more
than the roving fever of all lovers, in that it had a definite,
tangible object.

It would have been contrary to his nature to allow e