what she had said when
last he saw her; inquiring into every word she had uttered; finding,
with a sudden flash of delight, a new meaning which might perchance lurk
in a phrase of hers, and which could be construed into the intoxicating
belief that she had thought of him in his absence. This was far more
interesting than any of the vague processional effects that glided half
seen before his eyes, the streams of people with no apparent meaning in
them, who were going and coming, flowing this way and the other, on their
commonplace business. The phantasmagoria of moving forms and faces went
past and past, as he thought, altogether insignificant, meaning nothing.
She had said, "I wondered if you remarked"--something that had happened
when they were apart from each other; a sunset it was, now he remembered,
of remarkable splendour, which she had spoken of next day. "I wondered
if you remarked," not I wonder, which would have meant that at that
moment she was in the act of wondering, but I wonder_ed_, in the past,
as if, when the glorious crimsons and purples struck her imagination,
and gave her that high delight which nature can give to the lofty mind
(the adjectives too were his, poor boy), she had thought of him, perhaps,
as the one of all her friends who was most likely to feel as she was
feeling. Poor Warrender was conscious, with bitter shame and indignation
against himself, that at that moment he was buried in his father's gloomy
library, deep in the shadow of those trees which he had no longer leisure
to think of cutting, and was not so much as aware that there was a
sunset at all; and this he had been obliged to confess, with passionate
regret (since she had seen it, and given it thus an interest beyond
sunsettings): but afterwards recalled, with the tempestuous sudden joy
and misery that seized upon him all at once now.

In the middle of Rotten Row! with still so many pretty creatures on
so many fine horses cantering past, and even what was more wonderful,
Brunson, that inevitable competitor, the substance of solid success to
Warrender's romance of shadowy glory, walking along with his arm in that
of another scholar, and pointing to the man of dreams who saw them not.
"He is working out that passage in the Politics that your tutor makes
such a pother about," said the other. "Not a bit of it," cried Brunson,
"for that would pay." But they gave him credit, at all events, for some
classic theme, and not for the discov