een as they stood there together.
He did wish that he had not undertaken to go to Mr. Cornbury's house.
What to him would be the society of such people as he should find
there,--to him who had laid out for himself a career that would
necessarily place his life among other associates? "I'll send and
excuse myself," he said. "I'll be called away to Exeter. I have
things to do there. I shall only get into a mess by knowing people
who will drop me when this ferment of the election is over." And yet
the idea of an intimacy at such a house as Cornbury Grange,--with
such people as Mrs. Butler Cornbury, was very sweet to him; only
this, that if he associated with them or such as them it must be on
equal terms. He could acknowledge them to be people apart from him,
as ice creams and sponge cakes are things apart from the shillingless
schoolboy. But as the schoolboy, if brought within the range of cakes
and creams, must devour them with unchecked relish, as though his
pocket were lined with coin; so must he, Rowan, carry himself with
these curled darlings of society if he found himself placed among
them. He liked cakes and creams, but had made up his mind that other
viands were as wholesome and more comfortably within his reach. Was
it worth his while to go to this banquet which would unsettle his
taste, and at which perhaps if he sat there at his ease, he might not
be wholly welcome? All his thoughts were not noble. He had declared
to himself that a certain thing could not be his except at a cost
which he would not pay, and yet he hankered for that thing. He had
declared to himself that no social position in which he might ever
find himself should make a change in him, on his inner self or on
his outward manner; and now he feared to go among these people, lest
he should find himself an inferior among superiors. It was not all
noble; but there was beneath it a basis of nobility. "I will go," he
said at last, fearing that if he did not, there would have been some
grain of cowardice in the motives of his action. "If they don't like
me it's their fault for asking me."

Of course as he sat there he was thinking of Rachel. Of course he had
thought of Rachel daily, almost hourly, since he had been with her
at the cottage, when she had bent her head over his shoulder, and
submitted to have his arm round her waist. But his thoughts of her
were not as hers of him. Nor is it often that a man's love is like
a woman's,--restless, fearful, u