p her that
she cannot but melt to him. At the mere thought of it my brain reels."

He knew that his thoughts were half delirium, his words half raving,
yet he could not control them, and thanked chance that his apartment
was near none other which was occupied, and that he could stride about
and stamp his foot upon the floor, and yet no sound be heard beyond the
massive walls and doors. Outside such walls, in the face of the world,
he must utter no word, show no sign by any quiver of a muscle; and
'twas the realisation of the silence he must keep, the poignard stabs
he must endure without movement, which at this hour drove him to
madness.

"This is but the beginning," he groaned. "Since I am his kinsman and we
have been friends, I am bound as a man upon the rack is bound while he
is torn limb from limb. I must see it all--there will be no escape. At
their marriage I must attend them. God save me--taking my fit place as
the chief of my house at the nuptials of a well beloved kinsman, I must
share in the rejoicings, and be taunted by his rapture and her eyes.
Nay, nay, she cannot gaze at him as she would have gazed at me--she
cannot! Yet how shall I endure!"

For hours he walked to and fro, the mere sense of restless movement
being an aid to his mood. Sometimes again he flung himself into a seat
and sat with hidden eyes. But he could not shut out the pictures his
fevered fancy painted for him. A man of strong imagination, and who is
possessed by a growing passion, cannot fail to depict to himself, and
live in, vivid dreams of that future of his hopes which is his chiefest
joy. So he had dreamed, sometimes almost with the wild fervour of a
boy, smiling while he did it, at his own pleasure in the mere detail
his fancy presented to him. In these day-dreams his wealth, the beauty
and dignity of his estates, the brilliant social atmosphere his rank
assured him, had gained a value he had never recognised before. He
remembered now, with torturing distinctness, the happy day when it had
first entered his mind, that those things which had been his daily
surroundings from his childhood would all be new pleasures to her, all
in strong contrast to the atmosphere of her past years. His heart
actually leapt at the thought of the smilingness of fortune which had
lavished upon him so much, that 'twould be rapture to him to lay at her
feet. He had remembered tenderly the stately beauty of his beloved
Camylott, the bosky dells at Marlowe