pallid high-road as readily as he could have done
at noonday. In three-quarters of an hour he reached the park gates; and
entering now upon a tract which he had never before explored, he went
along more cautiously and with some uncertainty as to the precise
direction that the road would take. A frosted expanse of even grass, on
which the shadow of his head appeared with an opal halo round it, soon
allowed the house to be discovered beyond, the other portions of the park
abounding with timber older and finer than that of any other spot in the
neighbourhood. Christopher withdrew into the shade, and wheeled round to
the front of the building that contained his old love. Here he gazed and
idled, as many a man has done before him--wondering which room the fair
poetess occupied, waiting till lights began to appear in the upper
windows--which they did as uncertainly as glow-worms blinking up at
eventide--and warming with currents of revived feeling in perhaps the
sweetest of all conditions. New love is brightest, and long love is
greatest; but revived love is the tenderest thing known upon earth.

Occupied thus, Christopher was greatly surprised to see, on casually
glancing to one side, another man standing close to the shadowy trunk of
another tree, in a similar attitude to his own, gazing, with arms folded,
as blankly at the windows of the house as Christopher himself had been
gazing. Not willing to be discovered, Christopher stuck closer to his
tree. While he waited thus, the stranger began murmuring words, in a
slow soft voice. Christopher listened till he heard the following:--

'Pale was the day and rayless, love,
That had an eve so dim.'

Two well-known lines from one of Ethelberta's poems.

Jealousy is a familiar kind of heat which disfigures, licks playfully,
clouds, blackens, and boils a man as a fire does a pot; and on
recognizing these pilferings from what he had grown to regard as his own
treasury, Christopher's fingers began to nestle with great vigour in the
palms of his hands. Three or four minutes passed, when the unknown rival
gave a last glance at the windows, and walked away. Christopher did not
like the look of that walk at all--there was grace enough in it to
suggest that his antagonist had no mean chance of finding favour in a
woman's eyes. A sigh, too, seemed to proceed from the stranger's breast;
but as their distance apart was too great for any such sound to be heard
by any pos