tempt that will possess
her when he lays his case in all its nakedness before her. She is a
wilful, hot-tempered little thing, but the Blounts for generations have
been famed for a strain of honor toward friend and foe that runs in
their blood, and is dear to them as their lives. Therefore he knows her
word will be as sacred to her as her bond.

To Stephen just at this time the world is a howling wilderness; there is
no sun anywhere, and every spring is dry. He has fallen into the habit
of coming very seldom to the Court, where he used to be morning, noon,
and night, ever since his unlucky engagement; indeed, no one in the
house or out of it has seen him since the day before yesterday.

Sitting at home, brooding over his wrongs, with a short and
well-blackened pipe in his mouth, he is giving himself up a victim to
despair and rage. That he can still love her with even, it seems to him,
a deeper intensity than before, is the bitterest drop in his cup. It was
all so sudden, so unexpected. He tortures himself now with the false
belief that she was _beginning_ to love him, that she _might_ have loved
him had time been given him, and had Egypt held Roger but a few months
longer in her foster arms. In a little flash it had all come to him, and
now his life is barren, void of interest, and full of ceaseless pain.

"Bring withered Autumn leaves,
Call everything that grieves,
And build a funeral pyre above his head!
Heap there all golden promise that deceives,
Beauty that wins the heart, and then bereaves,
For love is dead.

"Not slowly did he die.
A meteor from the sky
Falls not so swiftly as his spirit fled--
When, with regretful, half-averted eye,
He gave one little smile, one little sigh,
And so was sped."

These verses, and such as these, he reads between his doleful musings.
It gives him some wretched comfort to believe Dulce had actually some
sparks of love for him before her cousin's return. An erroneous belief,
as she had never cared for him in that way at all, and at her best
moments had only a calm friendship for him. It is my own opinion that
even if Roger had never returned she yet would have found an excuse at
some time to break off her engagement with Gower, or, at least, to let
him understand that she would wish it broken.

To-day is fine, though frosty, and everybody,