. "There's no
getting over that. She said, 'You mustn't think I don't care.'" And even
if she hadn't said it, there was that look in her eyes. Could he ever
forget the look, or cease to thrill at the memory? No; he knew that he
could not, till the hour of his death. "It was because I'm not of her
world, that she couldn't bear to let herself go, and love me as she was
beginning to love me, I know," he thought, as he had thought countless
times before, in the weeks since he had quietly let her go out of his
life. "I'm not what she's been brought up to call a gentleman," his mind
went on drearily preaching to him. "I suppose I can't realize the bigness
and deepness of the gulf between us, as she sees it. I've only my own
standards to judge by. Hers are mighty different. I knew there _was_ a
gulf, but I hoped love would bridge it. She thought no bridge could be
strong enough for her to walk on to me. I wonder if she thinks the same
yet, or if the feeling I have sometimes, that she's calling to me from far
off, means anything? I told her that day I'd feel her thinking of me
across the world. Well--what if she's thinking of me now?"

Nick had often debated this subject, and looked at it from every point of
view; for after the first blow over the heart, a dim, scarcely perceptible
light of hope had come creeping back to him. Knowing from her words, and
better still from her eyes, that Angela had cared a little, at least
enough to suffer, Nick had wondered whether he might not make himself more
acceptable to her than he had been.

He did not disparage himself with undue humility in asking this question.
He knew that he was a man, and that honour and strength and cleanness of
living counted for something in this world. But if he could become more
like the men she knew--in other words, a gentleman fit to mate with a
great lady--what then?

For Nick was aware that his manners were not polished. In what Mrs. May
would call "society," no doubt he would be guilty of a thousand mistakes,
a thousand awkwardnesses. If he did anything rightly it would be by
instinct--instinct implanted by generations of his father's well-born,
well-bred ancestors--rather than from knowledge of what was conventionally
the "proper thing." If Angela had let love win, perhaps she might often
have been humiliated by his ignorances and stupidities, Nick reminded
himself; and for him that would have been worse than death, even as for
her, according to her adm