erify. Something lately seemed lost to them of that kind of glad
activity; he was more aware of it than she, since he was less occupied
in the aesthetic ecstasy of self-torture. In the old time before the sun
rose they had been so conscious of realms of idea lying just beyond
the achievement of thought, approachable, visible by phrases, brokenly,
realms which they could see closer when they essayed together. He
constantly struggled to reach those enchanted areas again, but they
seemed to have gone down behind the horizon; and the only inspiration
that carried them far drew its impetus from the poetry of their plight.
They looked for verses to prove that Browning's imagination carried him
bravely through lives and lives to come, and found them to speculate
whether in such chances they might hope to meet again.

And the talk came back to his difficulties with his Board of Management,
and to her choice of a frame for the etching he had given her, by his
friend the Glasgow impressionist, and to their opinion of a common
acquaintance, and to Lorne and his prospects. He told her how little
she resembled her brother, and where they diverged, and how; and she
listened with submission and delight, enchanted to feel his hand upon
her intimate nature. She lingered in the hall while he got into his
overcoat, and saw that a glove was the worse for wear. "Would it be the
heroic-in-little," she begged, "to let me mend that?"

As he went out alone into the winter streets he too drew upon a pagan
for his admonition. "'What then art thou doing here, O imagination?'" he
groaned in his private heart. "'Go away, I entreat thee by the gods, for
I want thee not. But thou art come again according to thy old fashion. I
am not angry with thee, only go away!'"

CHAPTER XXV

Miss Milburn pressed her contention that the suspicion of his desire
would be bad for her lover's political prospects till she made him feel
his honest passion almost a form of treachery to his party. She also
hinted that, for the time being, it did not make particularly for her
own comfort in the family circle, Mr Milburn having grown by this time
quite bitter. She herself drew the excitement of intrigue from the
situation, which she hid behind her pretty, pale, decorous features, and
never betrayed by the least of her graceful gestures. She told herself
that she had never been so right about anything as about that affair of
the ring--imagine, for an instant, if she