's sympathetic charm had replaced it, but with suggestions of
hidden conflict and suffering, of which Lady Risborough's bright
sweetness had known nothing. It was borne in upon him that, since her
arrival in Oxford, Constance had gone through a great deal, and gone
through it alone. For after all what had his efforts amounted to? What
can a man friend do for a young girl in the fermenting years of her
youth! And when the man friend knows very well that, but for an iron
force upon himself, he himself would be among her lovers? Sorell felt
himself powerless--in all the greater matters--and was inclined to think
that he deserved to be powerless. Yet he had done his best; and through
his Greek lessons he humbly knew that he had helped her spiritual
growth, just as the Greek immortals had helped and chastened his own
youth. They had been reading Homer together--parts both of the "Iliad"
and the "Odyssey"; and through "that ageless mouth of all the world,"
what splendid things had spoken to her!--Hector's courage, and
Andromache's tenderness, the bitter sorrow of Priam, the pity of
Achilles, mother love and wife love, death and the scorn of death. He
had felt her glow and tremble in the grip of that supreme poetry; for
himself he had found her the dearest and most responsive of pupils.

But what use was anything, if after all, as Radowitz vowed, she was in
love with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the man of Scroll's
type--disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in action
to the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden's
type--strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined--is
perennial. Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attraction
for women of the other.

Sorell sat on impatiently in the darkening garden, hoping always that
Connie would explain, would confess; for he was certain that she had
somehow schemed for this preposterous reconciliation--if it was a
reconciliation. She wanted no doubt to heal Falloden's conscience, and
so to comfort her own. And she would sacrifice Otto, if need be, in the
process! He vowed to himself that he would prevent it, if he could.

Connie eyed him wistfully. Confidences seemed to be on her very lips;
and then stopped there. In the end she neither explained nor confessed.
But when he was gone, she walked up and down the lawn under the evening
sky, her hands behind her--passionately dreaming.

She had never thought of any such