ld outlast it. Very likely _we_
shall be friends again, like ordinary people, some day. I do not imagine
your wound is very deep, and----'

But no! Her lips closed; not even for pride's sake, and retort's sake,
will she desecrate the past, belittle her own first love.

She held out her hand. It was very dark. He could see nothing among
her furs but the gleaming whiteness of her face. The whole personality
seemed centred in the voice--the half-mocking, vibrating voice. He took
her hand and dropped it instantly.

'You do not understand,' he said, hopelessly--feeling as though every
phrase he uttered, or could utter, were equally fatuous, equally
shameful. 'Thank heaven you never will understand.'

'I think I do,' she said with a change of tone, and paused. He raised
his eyes involuntarily, met hers, and stood bewildered. What _was_ the
expression in them? It was yearning--but not the yearning of passion.
'If things had been different--if one could change the self--if the past
were nobler!--was that the cry of them? A painful humility--a boundless
pity--the rise of some moral wave within her he could neither measure
nor explain--these were some of the impressions which passed from her to
him. A fresh gulf opened between them, and he saw her transformed on
the farther side, with, as it were, a loftier gesture, a nobler stature,
than had ever yet been hers.

He bent forward quickly, caught her hands, held them for an instant to
his lips in a convulsive grasp, dropped them, and was gone.

He gained his own room again. There lay the medley of his books, his
only friends, his real passion. Why had he ever tampered with any other?

'_It was not love--not love!_' he said to himself, with an accent of
infinite relief as he sank into his chair. '_Her_ smart will heal.'

BOOK VI. NEW OPENINGS.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

Ten days after Langham's return to Oxford, Elsmere received a
characteristic letter from him, asking whether their friendship was to
be considered as still existing or at an end. The calm and even proud
melancholy of the letter showed a considerable subsidence of that state
of half-frenzied irritation and discomfort in which Elsmere had last
seen him. The writer, indeed, was clearly settling down into another
period of pessimistic quietism such as that which had followed upon
his first young efforts at self-assertion years before. But this second
period bore the marks of an even profounder depression of