hes of the little fire
Robert had made dropping on the hearth, and not a word on either side.

At last Elsmere could not bear it, and when midnight struck he sprang
up with an impatient shake of his long body, and Langham took the hint,
gave him a cold good-night, and went.

As the door shut upon him, Robert dropped back into his chair, and sat
on, his face in his hands, staring dolefully at the fire. It seemed to
him the world was going crookedly. A day on which a man of singularly
open and responsive temper makes a new enemy, and comes nearer than
ever before to losing an old friend, shows very blackly to him in the
calendar, and by way of aggravation, a Robert Elsmere says to himself
at once, that somehow or other there must be fault of his own in the
matter.

Rose!--pshaw! Catherine little knows what stuff that cold, intangible
soul is made of.

Meanwhile, Langham was standing heavily, looking out into the night. The
different elements in the mountain of discomfort that weighed upon him
were so many that the weary mind made no attempt to analyze them. He had
a sense of disgrace, of having stabbed something gentle that had leant
upon him, mingled with a strong intermittent feeling of unutterable
relief. Perhaps his keenest regret was that, after all it had not been
love! He had offered himself up to a girl's just contempt, but he had no
recompense in the shape of a great addition to knowledge, to experience.
Save for a few doubtful moments at the beginning, when he had all but
surprised himself in something more poignant, what he had been conscious
of had been nothing more than a suave and delicate charm of sentiment, a
subtle surrender to one exquisite aesthetic impression after another. And
these things in other relations, the world had yielded him before.

'Am I sane?' he muttered to himself. 'Have I ever been sane? Probably
not. The disproportion between my motives and other men's is too great
to be normal. Well at least I am sane enough to shut myself up. Long
after that beautiful child has forgotten she ever saw me I shall still
be doing penance in the desert.'

He threw himself down beside the open window with a groan. An hour later
he lifted a face blanched and lined, and stretched out his band with
avidity toward a book on the table. It was an obscure and difficult
Greek text, and he spent the greater part of the night over it,
rekindling in himself with feverish haste the embers of his one lasting
pa