ravelling, and his vaunted habit of laughter scarce served at
present to show him the way out.

CHAPTER VI. HORTENSIA'S RETURN

Mr. Caryll needs explaining as he walks there in the moonlight; that
is, if we are at all to understand him--a matter by no means easy,
considering that he has confessed he did not understand himself. Did
ever man make a sincere declaration of sudden passion as flippantly as
he had done, or in terms-better calculated to alienate the regard he
sought to win? Did ever man choose his time with less discrimination,
or his words with less discretion? Assuredly not. To suppose that Mr.
Caryll was unaware of this, would be to suppose him a fool, and that he
most certainly was not.

His mood was extremely complex; its analysis, I fear, may baffle us.
It must have seemed to you--as it certainly seemed to Mistress
Winthrop--that he made a mock of her; that in truth he was the impudent,
fleering coxcomb she pronounced him, and nothing more. Not so. Mock he
most certainly did; but his mockery was all aimed to strike himself on
the recoil--himself and the sentiments which had sprung to being in his
soul, and to which--nameless as he was, pledged as he was to a task that
would most likely involve his ruin--he conceived that he had no right.
He gave expression to his feelings, yet chose for them the expression
best calculated to render them barren of all consequence where Mistress
Winthrop was concerned. Where another would have hidden those emotions,
Mr. Caryll elected to flaunt them half-derisively, that Hortensia might
trample them under foot in sheer disgust.

It was, perhaps, the knowledge that did he wait, and come to her as an
honest, devout lover, he must in honesty tell her all there was to know
of his odd history and of his bastardy, and thus set up between them a
barrier insurmountable. Better, he may have thought, to make from the
outset a mockery of a passion for which there could be no hope. And so,
under that mocking, impertinent exterior, I hope you catch some glimpse
of the real, suffering man--the man who boasted that he had the gift of
laughter.

He continued a while to pace the dewy lawn after she had left him, and
a deep despondency descended upon the spirit of this man who accounted
seriousness a folly. Hitherto his rancor against his father had been a
theoretical rancor, a thing educated into him by Everard, and accepted
by him as we accept a proposition in Euclid that is p