fending consort.

"I believe it will never be four o'clock again," he said, in despair,
finally; and once more had out his watch. It was half-past three. He
scowled at the instrument's bland white face. "You have no bowels, no
sensibilities--nothing but dry little methodical jog-trot wheels and
pivots!" he exclaimed, flying to insult for relief. "You're as inhuman
as a French functionary. Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade
for an impatient man?" He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited
through a last eternity. At a quarter to four he crossed the river. "If
I am early--tant pis!" he decided, choosing the lesser of two evils, and
challenging Fate.

He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the grounds of
Ventirose--stood where she had been in the habit of standing, during
their water-side colloquies. He glanced back at his house and garden,
envisaging them for the first time, as it were, from her point of
view. They had a queer air of belonging to an era that had passed, to
a yesterday already remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small,
moreover--the garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its
striped sunblinds, poor and petty. He turned his back upon them--left
them behind. He would have to come home to them later in the day, to be
sure; but then everything would be different. A chapter would have added
itself to the history of the world; a great event, a great step forward,
would have definitely taken place. He would have been received
at Ventirose as a friend. He would be no longer a mere nodding
acquaintance, owing even that meagre relationship to the haphazard
of propinquity. The ice-broken, if you will, but still present in
abundance--would have been gently thawed away. One era had passed; but
then a new era would have begun.

So he turned his back upon Villa F'loriano, and set off, high-hearted,
up the wide lawns, under the bending trees--whither, on four red-marked
occasions, he had watched her disappear--towards the castle, which
faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest
portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round
towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured
in fantastic streaks and patches by weather-stains and lichens, or
else shaggily overgrown by creepers. Then there were later portions,
rectangular, pink-stuccoed, with rusticated work at the corners, and,
on the blank spaces between the w