orative effect of touching him to see his old hero in
action; whereby he was brought about to a proper modesty, so that he
really craved no more than for the mistress of this house to breathe the
liberal air of a public acknowledgment of her rightful position.
Things constituted by their buoyancy to float are remarkable for lively
bobbings when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with
Weyburn, until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to
sail away in the society of the steadiest.

He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the
circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would
best be able--probably it was the one way--to keep himself together; and
his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he
abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight. For if
one is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and
enters us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has
us as a foe. The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an
intimate knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within. Safest
for him, after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant
person he was, both there and anywhere else. The Countess of Ormont's
manner toward him was to be read as a standing index of the course he
should follow; and he thanked her. He could not quite so sincerely thank
her aunt. His ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to
him sprang a doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account
of services performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.

Certain looks of those eyes recently, when in colloquy with my lord,
removed the towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape.

Was it solely an effect of eyes commanding light, and having every
shaft of the quiver of the rays at her disposal? Or was it a shot from a
powerful individuality issuing out of bondage to some physical oppressor
no longer master of the soul, in peril of the slipping away of the body?
Her look on him was not hate: it was larger, more terribly divine. Those
eyes had elsewhere once looked love: they had planted their object in
a throbbing Eden. The man on whom they had looked shivered over the
thought of it after years of blank division.

Rather than have those eyes to look on him their displacing
unintentness, the man on whom they had once looked love would have
chosen looks of wrath,