rses slowly up and
down the woodland drive in the blear and sightless fog, life appeared
quite other than an entrancing pastime. The pictures projected by his
thought, and forming the medium of it, caused him black indignation and
revolt, desolated him, too, with a paralysing disgust of his own
disabilities. For poor Dick had declined somewhat in the last few
hours, it must be owned, from the celestial altitudes he had reached
before luncheon. Some part of his cousin's discourse had been
dangerously intimate in character, suggesting situations quite other
than platonic. To him there appeared a noble innocence in her treatment
of matters not usually spoken of. He had listened with a certain
reverent amazement. Only out of purity of mind could such speech come.
And yet an undeniable effect remained, and it was not altogether
elevating. Richard was no longer the young Sir Galahad of the noontide
of this eventful day. He was just simply a man--in a sensible degree
the animal man--loving a woman, hating that other man to whom she was
legally bound. Hating that other man, not only because he was unworthy
and failed to make her happy, but because he stood in his--Richard's--way.
Hating the man all the more fiercely because, whatever the uncomeliness
of his moral constitution, he was physically very far from uncomely.
And so, along with nobler incitements to hatred, went the fiend envy,
which just now plucked at poor Dickie's vitals as the vulture at those
of the chained Titan of old. Whereupon he fell into a meditation
somewhat morbid. For, contemplating in pictured thought that other
man's bodily perfection, contemplating his property and victim,--the
fair modern Helen, who by her courage and her trials exercised so
potent a spell over his imagination,--Richard loathed his own maimed
body, maimed chances and opportunities, as he had never loathed them
before. How often since his childhood had some casual circumstance or
trivial accident brought the fact of his misfortune home to him,
causing him--as he at the moment supposed--to reckon, once and for all,
with the sum total of it! But as years passed and experience widened,
below each depth of this adhering misery another deep disclosed itself.
Would he never reach bottom? Would this inalienable disgrace continue
to show itself more restricting and impeding to his action, more
repulsive and contemptible to his fellow-men, through all the
succeeding stages and vicissitudes of hi