rogations, mostly
unanswerable. A plaintive need of happiness, melancholy, obscure, but
recurrent, mixed in his fluctuating thoughts. Finally, it pursued him,
haunted him, and caught him with the strange tenacity of an incorporeal
grasp. Sara, now dethroned from her place of power, loomed in all his
dreams. Irresistibly, he was drawn toward the forbidden recollection of
her delightfulness. There seemed no longer any danger in these musings.
He had entrusted his actual life to the safe-keeping of the nicest woman
he had ever known. Where then was the harm in harking back, merely in
reverie, to the frivolous, amusing phantom of a renounced sentiment?
Yet, after a reverie of the kind, why did he often wonder how he and
Agnes could look in one another's faces and pretend to any sort of real
intimacy? Sara knew him better than he knew himself. Her sympathy ran
into a hundred sinuosities--she understood his silence as well as his
conversation. He was never conscious of the smallest strain, the least
dissimulation, in her society. Beneath their curious disparities an
identity seemed to unite them. There was an unrepenting quality in her
conscience which braced and stimulated his moral courage. Agnes, on the
contrary, with her instinct of behaviour, made him over-cautious and
encouraged the tendency to indecision which interfered with the
comfortable balance of his soul. And he wished his faculties to work
with astronomic punctuality. It is certain, however, that he would have
accepted his choice as a thing settled beyond any readjustment, but for
the news of the Duke of Marshire's proposal, and the sight of Sara
herself on the fatal afternoon when he was feeling especially forlorn.
She had thrown him a glance in which defiance, disdain, and an
indistinct affection were blended in one provoking dart. He was a
moralist who believed that there is always, between men and women, the
dormant principles of mistrust and hatred. He had discussed this theory
frequently with Robert, who found the notion as repulsive as it was
false. But it seemed a truth beyond contradiction to Reckage, who
possessed, in his own mind, constant irrefutable testimony in support of
the view. Sara had never before defied him. She had never before seemed
to feel her power as a creature incomparably superior in brilliancy to
all the other girls in their circle. She had never before seemed to
pity him as a man who had feared to do what Marshire--a being considere