. He could not possibly have told
why, but he hoped she did not say that often, and when Brandon gave it
into her hand again, and said something to her that Valentine could not
hear, he felt almost as if he had been unkindly used, as if his feelings
had been insulted, and he vowed that it should be a long time before he
came to see them again.

"It won't do," he thought to himself. "I see this means a great deal
more than I ever thought it did. I thought Giles would be jealous, and I
should have to set things in a light that would satisfy him; but it is
I who am jealous, and he does not care what I feel at all. She is all I
could wish; but I don't know whether looking at her is most bitter or
most sweet."

As for John, he had walked down to the wood as usual, in full possession
of his present self, and as he supposed of his future intentions, and
yet, sitting opposite to these married lovers for a quarter of an hour,
wrought a certain change in him that nothing ever effaced. It was an
alien feeling to him to be overcome by a yearning discontent. Something
never yet fed and satisfied made its presence known to him. It was not
that sense which comes to all, sooner or later, that human life cannot
give us what we expected of it, but rather a passionate waking to the
certainty that he never even for one day had possessed what it might
have given. He had never been endowed for one day with any deep love,
with its keen perceptions and high companionship.

"Well, I suppose I didn't deserve it," he thought, half angrily, while
he tried to trample the feeling down and stifle it. But his keener
instincts soon rose up in him and let him know that he did deserve it.
It was very extraordinary that he had not won it--there were few men,
indeed, who deserved it half so well.

"But it's too late now," he chose to say to himself, as he drove home.
"It's not in my line either to go philandering after any woman. Besides,
I hate red hair. The next _Dissolution_ I'll stand for the borough of
Wigfield. Seven children to bring up, and one of them almost as big as
myself--what a fool I am! What can I have been thinking of?"

"What are you laughing at, papa?" said Barbara, who was sitting beside
him.

"Not at you, my darling," he replied; "for you are something real."

For the next few weeks neither he nor Valentine saw much of Dorothea:
excepting at three or four dinners, they scarcely met at all. After this
came the Harrow holidays. J