ould let
things alone. Had he had the gift of those who can, he would just then
have been governor of some rising colony, and would have been in a fair
way of promotion. He was tormented by the thought that there was
something he ought to do to save Minola from some vaguely terrible
fate, and by not being able to see what the something was which lay
within his power to do. Before he had walked many yards he had worked
himself into the idea that a plot of some sort was in preparation to
entrap Minola into a marriage with one who, poet or not, was wholly
unworthy of her.

His energetic spirit at length suggested something to be done. It was
not, perhaps, a very practical or useful stroke of policy, but it was
the only thing which occurred to him and the only thing which he did
just then. He started off at full speed to walk under the windows of
the house where Miss Grey was living. It was now fully midnight, and of
course he had not the slightest idea of seeing Minola, and, indeed,
would have been greatly embarrassed if he had seen her. But he started
off, nevertheless, to walk under her windows with as eager a step and
as steady a purpose as if he were really hastening to rescue her from
some imminent danger. It was only a short walk from where he then was
to Minola's lodgings; but Heron was so eager in his purpose that the
way seemed miles, which he was covering with hasty strides.

When he reached the house where Minola lived, the aspect of the place
was just such as, if he had been a lover, he might have expected or
desired to find. The house was all in darkness save for one window.
There was a looking-glass in that window, making it plain to the least
observant of human creatures that it must be the window of a bedroom.
How could a lover doubt that that must be the window of the room which
was hers, and that she then watched the stars of midnight, and that she
thought of love, and that her soul was, as Jean Paul puts it, in the
blue ether? For the moment Victor Heron found himself wishing that he
were a lover--were the lover of whom the lady, fancy-fixed in that one
lighted room, might be thinking. But if it were Minola's room, he
thought, she certainly had not him or any memory of him in her mind. It
was a clear, soft midnight, and the moon that shone on the near roof of
the British Museum seemed as poetic and as sad as though it fell on the
ruins of the Parthenon. No practice in colonial administration can
wholly