The Well-Beloved

nd he had walked through the rooms, about the lawn, and into the surrounding plantation of elms, which on this island of treeless rock lent a unique chara

ig down to a loose stratum of the underlying stone-beds, where a forest of conifers lay as petrifa

were in their own quarters, and he went out unobserved. Crossing a hollow overhung by the budding boughs he approached an empty garden-house of Elizabethan desi

ry to pull down their blinds at nightfall. And, as he had divined, the inside of the young

s and the heat of the stove. Yet it was in perfect and passionless repose, which imparted a Minerva cast to the profile. When she glanced up, her lineaments seemed to have all the soul and heart that had characterized her mother's, and had been with her a true index

ken by a plain board. The tall old clock, with its ancient oak carcase, arched brow, and humorous mouth, was also not to be seen, a cheap, white-dialled specimen doing its

ors. That this girl's frame was doomed to be a real embodiment of that olden seductive one-that Protean dream-creature, who h

in sanity had, after all, accompanied his former idealizing passions: the Beloved had seldom informed a pers

ite cloth, which burden she bore round to the back door. Of course, she washed for his own household: he had not thought of that. In the morning sunlight she appeare

r-penetrating being whom he knew so well! The occupation of the subserving minion, the blemishes of the temporary creature who formed the bac

ng, for she had hardly become acquainted with him; yet that she should have avoided him was a new experience. He had no opportunity for a further study of her by di

etically. 'But since her mother's death she has enough to do to kee

. Send her in when she

iteful criticism of a late work of his, he was told

ffly. 'I am a very particular person, and

ied the maiden, in a scared and res

d then, the mangling

a mangle, sir

y. And I object to so m

ned in the same close way; 'ne

I s

k of a dialogue on linen. He could not read her individual character, owing to the confusing effect of her likeness to a woman whom he had valued t

iness in hand. She had answered to the point, a

ice,' he said. 'You rem

es

hree months, and you will be very useful t

aid the self-

l, she who was once so throbbingly alive to his presence that, not many yards from this spot, she had flung her arms round him and given him a kiss which, despised in its freshness,

ed and well-informed wom

ir; everybo

you rese

her head, and d

not brought much linen, so you m

good

't forge

n

he epiderm of her nature. It was monstrous that a maiden who had assumed the personality of her of his tenderest memory should be so imperv

older than when he had wooed the mother at the daughter's present

es-how he envied them, assuming them to feel as they appeared to feel, with their commerce and their politics, their glasses and their pipes. They had got past the distracting currents of passionateness, and were in the calm waters of middle-aged philosop

ld not again call upon her, she was as inaccessible as if she

r with names and initials. He knew the spot and the old trick well, and by searching in the faint moon-rays he found a pair of names which, as a boy, he himself had cut. They were 'AVICE' and 'JOCELYN'-Avice Caro's and his own. The letters were now nearly worn away by the weath

n. The revivified Avice animated the dwelling, and the light with

emed to have something sinister in it. On the other hand, the most abrupt encounter with him moved her to no emotion as it had moved her prototype

y in this infatuation. It threw him into a sweat. What if now, at last, he were doomed to do penance for his past emotional wanderings (in a material sense) by being chained in fatal fidelity

ied daughter of some ecclesiastic or peer to a Nubian Almeh with her handkerchief, undulating to the beats of the tom-tom; but all these embodiments had been endowed with a certain smartness, either of the flesh or

s own; it was misfortune that had sent her down to this. Odd as it seemed to him, her limitations were largely what he loved her for. Her rejuvenating po