ommon cause with the fiery spirit of youth and spurred him into
reckless pursuit of that abiding rapture which is the dream and the
despair of the earth's purest souls. The pistol bullet checked his
course, happily at the right moment. He had gone far enough for
experience and not too far for self-recovery. The wise man in looking
back upon his endeavours regrets nothing of which that can be said.

By the side of a passion such as that which had opened Hubert's
intellectual manhood, the mild, progressive attachments sanctioned by
society show so colourless as to suggest illusion. Thinking of Adela
Waltham as he lay recovering from his illness, he found it difficult
to distinguish between the feelings associated with her name and those
which he had owed to other maidens of the same type. A week or two
at Wanley generally resulted in a conviction that he was in love with
Adela; and had Adela been entirely subject to her mother's influences,
had she fallen but a little short of the innocence and delicacy which
were her own, whether for happiness or the reverse, she would doubtless
have been pledged to Hubert long ere this. The merest accident had in
truth prevented it. At home for Christmas, the young man had made up his
mind to speak and claim her: he postponed doing so till he should have
returned from a visit to a college friend in the same county. His friend
had a sister, five or six years older than Adela, and of a warmer type
of beauty, with the finished graces of the town. Hubert found himself
once more without guidance, and so left Wanley behind him, journeying to
an unknown land.

Hubert could not remember a time when he had not been in love. The
objects of his devotion had succeeded each other rapidly, but each in
her turn was the perfect woman. His imagination cast a halo about a
beautiful head, and hastened to see in its possessor all the poetry of
character which he aspired to worship. In his loves, as in every other
circumstance of life, he would have nothing of compromise; for him the
world contained nothing but his passion, and existence had no other end.
Between that past and this present more intervened than Hubert could yet
appreciate; but he judged the change in himself by the light in which
that early love appeared to him. Those were the restless ardours of
boyhood: he could not henceforth trifle so with solemn meanings. The
ideal was harder of discovery than he had thought; perhaps it was not
to be f