Robert Orange

pirits at his friend's step, for he himself was about to take a wife also, and much of the apprehension which he felt on his own account found its vent in d

between two idealists so highly strung, and so passionately attached as these two beings were-what would happen? No doubt they would be able to endure the inevitable disillusions-(inevitable because Nature is before all things sensual and has no care for mental prejudices one way or the other)-the inevitable disillusions of family life. It was scarcely possible that the devotion of Robert and Mrs. Parflete would not waver or seem less exquisite under this discipline. Their dream of love would become unparadised. It would gain a sadness, a melancholy, a note of despair hard to endure and most difficult to repress. Reckage had no transcendentalism in his own philosophy: he divided men into two classes-those who read, and those who could not sta

g," he told himself. "He has no expe

man did not marry, and, while Reckage was unable to agree in the main with Newman's views, he had a fixed notion that he was the strong man-the master spirit-among them. And another consideration. The passion of love has a danger for very sensitive, reserved, and concentrated minds unknown to creatures of more volatile, expansive, and unreflecting disposition. Reckage knew well that he was himself too selfish a man to let affection for any one creature come between his soul and its God. There was no self-discipline required in his case when a choice had to be made between a human being and his own advantage-whether temporal or eternal. He had never-since he was a youth-felt an immoderate fondness for anybody; he had likes and dislikes, admirations and partialities, jealousies, too, and well-defined tastes where feminine beauty was in question, but it was not in him to err from excess of charity. The imaginative and visionary parts of life-and no one is wholly without them-soon turned into severe reality whenever he found himself confronted with that sole absorbing interest-his career. Marriage, in his own case, seemed an imperative duty. He was an eldest son, the heir to an earldom and a vast estate; he wished to lead a distinguished, comfortable, and edifying existence. His wife would be a helpmate, not a snare; the mother of his children, not the light of hi

between all this sleeplessness, and fasting, and over-work. Flesh and blood ca

in preparing the table which, set for two covers, showed a pretty display of cut-glass, flowers, old silver, and shining damask under the yellow rays of the lit candles. Some family portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, a Holbein, and a Vandyck, with lamps shining like footlights beneath them, were d

y, stormed at the servants for their carelessn

o another fine room, which led by step

, looking at the clouds, greyer than a gull's wing, wh

e himself with peculiar firmness and ease. His brown eyes, with their brilliant, defiant glance, his close, dark beard, and powerful aquiline features; the entire absence of vanity, or the desire to produ

h other pleasantly, but with

to me to ask 'em to dine with us to-night. I raced after their brougham, but my brute of a horse-Pluto: you know the beast-gave me such a lot of trouble that I couldn't speak to them. How are

ined every dark corner, answered every turbulent doubt. From the habit of this wholly mental emotion, he had lost, little by little, the sense of the actual bodily existence of the woman herself. It is true that he thought of her always as some one modestly beautiful, of childish form, with a face like a water-nymph's-imperious, magical, elusive, yet, whenever he found himself in her presence, she seemed further away than when they were, in fact, apart. The kiss he had given her on the day of their betrothal had been as strange, indefinable, and irrealisable as the passing of one hour into the next. There had been the time before he kissed her, there was the time afterwards, but the transition had been so swift, and so little recognised, so inevitable, that while it drew both their lives down deep into the wild, pitiless surge of human feelin

the winds we cannot see and the melodies we only hear. The other, with its profound appeals to mortality, its demands upon all that is strongest in affection and eternal in courage, its irreparableness, suffering, and constancy, might, indeed, have the grandeur of all human tragedy, and the dignity of a holy state; but that it could ever be so beautiful as the love which is a silent influence was to Robert then, at least, an inconceivable idea. He felt upon him and around him, in his fle

rged him to tear open that still face and drag the thoughts behind it to the light. Why was it that one could never, by any sense, enter into another's spirit? The same torturing mystery had often disturbed him during the half-hours-outwardly placid and

to break in, with a touch of crude

er?" he exclaimed

such violent jars that they could no long

ut w

rts of

e from dissatisfie

red, "but I can throw ou

hat he was not dressed fo