most. He kept
a tight hold on his fancy, but if, as sometimes happened, it slipped
control, and painted further looks of the kind he had seen exchanged
between them, a kiss or an embrace, he was as wretched as if he had in
reality been present.

At other times, this jealous unrest was not the bitterest drop in his
cup; it was bitterer to know that she was squandering her love on one
who was unworthy of it. At first, from a feeling of exaggerated
delicacy, he had gone out of his way to escape hearing Schilsky's name;
but this mood passed, and gave place to an undignified hankering to
learn everything he could, concerning the young man. What he heard
amounted to this: a talented rascal, the best violinist the
Conservatorium had turned out for years, one to whom all gates would
open; but--this "but" always followed, with a meaning smile and a wink
of the eye: and then came the anecdotes. They had nothing
heaven-scaling in them--these soiled love-stories; this perpetual
impecuniosity; this inability to refuse money, no matter whose the hand
that offered it; this fine art in the disregarding of established
canons--and, to Maurice Guest, bred to sterner standards, they seemed
unspeakably low and mean. Hours came when he strove in vain to
understand her. Ignorant of these things she could not be; was it
within the limits of the possible that she could overlook them?--and he
shivered lest he should be forced to think less highly of her.
Ultimately, sending his mind back over what he had read and heard,
drawing on his own slight experience, he came to a compromise with
himself. He said that most often the best and fairest women loved men
who were unworthy of them. Was it not a weakness and a strength of her
sex to see good where no good was?--a kind of divine frailty, a wilful
blindness, a sweet inability to discern.

At times, again, he felt almost content that Schilsky was what he was.
If the day should ever come when, all barriers down, he, Maurice Guest,
might be intimately associated with her life; if he should ever have
the chance of proving to her what real love was, what a holy mystic
thing, how far removed from a blind passing fancy; if he might serve
her, be her slave, lay his hands under her feet, lead her up and on,
all suffused in a sunset of tenderness: then, she would see that what
she had believed to be love had been nothing but a FATA MORGANA, a
mirage of the skies. And he heard himself whispering words of
i