h in them. It all seemed to her so untoward. This was
not the man she had dreamed of--the unknown of her inmost heart. _He_
had been young, ardent, impetuous like herself. Hand in hand, eye
flashing into eye, pulse answering to pulse, they would have flung aside
the veil hanging over life and plundered the golden mysteries behind it.

She rebels; she tries to see the cold alien nature which has laid this
paralyzing spell upon her as it is, to reason herself back to peace--to
indifference. The poor child flies from her own half-understood trouble;
will none of it; murmurs again wildly,--

'I hate him! I hate him! Cold-blooded--ungrateful--unkind!'

In vain. A pair of melancholy eyes haunt, inthrall her inmost soul. The
charm of the denied, the inaccessible is on her, womanlike.

That old sense of capture, of helplessness, as of some lassoed,
struggling creature, descended upon her. She lay sobbing, there, trying
to recall what she had been a week before; the whirl of her London
visit, the ambitions with which it had filled her; the bewildering,
many-colored lights it had thrown upon life, the intoxicating sense of
artistic power. In vain.

The stream will not flow, and the hills will not rise;
And the colors have all passed away from her eyes.

She felt herself bereft, despoiled. And yet through it all, as she lay
weeping, there came flooding a strange contradictory sense of growth,
of enrichment. In such moments of pain does a woman first begin to live?
Ah! why should it hurt so--this long-awaited birth of the soul?

BOOK III. THE SQUIRE.

CHAPTER XIX.

The evening of the Murewell Hall dinner-party proved to be a date of
some importance in the lives of two or three persons. Rose was not
likely to forget it; Langham carried about with him the picture of
the great drawing-room, its stately light and shade, and its scattered
figures, through many a dismal subsequent hour: and to Robert it was the
beginning of a period of practical difficulties such as his fortunate
youth had never yet encountered.

His conjecture had hit the mark. The Squire's sentiments toward him,
which had been on the whole friendly enough, with the exception of a
slight nuance of contempt provoked in Mr. Wendover's mind by all forms
of the clerical calling, had been completely transformed in the course
of the afternoon before the dinner-party, and transformed by the report
of his agent. Henslowe who knew certain sides o