irl's innocent, ignorant readiness to stamp the world's stuff anew
after the forms of her own pitying thought, with a positive thirst of
sympathy. The deep poetry and ideality at the root of him under all the
weight of intellectual and critical debate leapt towards her. He thought
of the rapid talk she had poured out upon him, after their compact of
friendship, in their walk back to the church, of her enthusiasm for her
Socialist friends and their ideals,--with a momentary madness of
self-suppression and tender humility. In reality, a man like Aldous
Raeburn is born to be the judge and touchstone of natures like Marcella
Boyce. But the illusion of passion may deal as disturbingly with moral
rank as with social.

It was his first love. Years before, in the vacation before he went to
college, his boyish mind had been crossed, by a fancy for a pretty
cousin a little older than himself, who had been very kind indeed to
Lord Maxwell's heir. But then came Cambridge, the flow of a new mental
life, his friendship for Edward Hallin, and the beginnings of a moral
storm and stress. When he and the cousin next met, he was quite cold to
her. She seemed to him a pretty piece of millinery, endowed with a trick
of parrot phrases. She, on her part, thought him detestable; she married
shortly afterwards, and often spoke to her husband in private of her
"escape" from that queer fellow Aldous Raeburn.

Since then he had known plenty of pretty and charming women, both in
London and in the country, and had made friends with some of them in his
quiet serious way. But none of them had roused in him even a passing
thrill of passion. He had despised himself for it; had told himself
again and again that he was but half a man--

Ah! he had done himself injustice--he had done himself injustice!

His heart was light as air. When at last the sound of a clock striking
in the plain roused him with a start, and he sprang up from the heap of
stones where he had been sitting in the dusk, he bent down a moment to
give a gay caress to his dog, and then trudged off briskly home,
whistling under the emerging stars.

CHAPTER VI.

By the time, however, that Aldous Raeburn came within sight of the
windows of Maxwell Court his first exaltation had sobered down. The
lover had fallen, for the time, into the background, and the capable,
serious man of thirty, with a considerable experience of the world
behind him, was perfectly conscious that there wer