him take her any farther.

'I will say nothing,' she whispered to him, as he put her into a passing
hansom, wrapping her cloak warmly round her, 'till I see you again.
To-morrow?'

'To-morrow morning,' he said, waving his hand to her, and in another
instant he was facing the north wind alone.

He walked on fast towards Beaumont Street, but by the time he reached
his destination midnight had struck. He made his way into his room where
the fire was still smouldering, and striking a light, sank into his
large reading chair, beside which the volumes used in the afternoon lay
littered on the floor.

He was suddenly penetrated with the cold of the night, and hung
shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What had happened to
him? In this room, in this chair, the self-forgetting excitement of that
walk, scarcely half an hour old, seems to him already long
passed--incredible almost.

And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full of a
hundred new impressions. That fair head against his breast, those soft
confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah! it is the poor, silent,
insignificant student that has conquered. It is he, not the successful
man of the world, that has held that young and beautiful girl in his
arms, and heard from her the sweetest and humblest confession of love.
Fate can have neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so; but
fate has so ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal
note also that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.

So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which
life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt
the torturing thrill of passion--he has evoked such an answer as all
men might envy him,--and fresh from Rose's kiss, from Rose's beauty, the
strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, her
response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of
gratitude and tenderness; the next--is nothing what it promises to
be?--and has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost
some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where
its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy charm?

The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would rattle over
the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step would penetrate
the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock of sound into that silent
upper room. Nothin