In the peculiar condition of their sojourn Miss Moorsom went out very little.  She accepted this seclusion at the Dunsters’ mansion as in a hermitage, and lived there, watched over by a group of old people, with the lofty endurance of a condescending and strong-headed goddess.  It was impossible to say if she suffered from anything in the world, and whether this was the insensibility of a great passion concentrated on itself, or a perfect restraint of manner, or the indifference of superiority so complete as to be sufficient to itself.  But it was visible to Renouard that she took some pleasure in talking to him at times.  Was it because he was the only person near her age?  Was this, then, the secret of his admission to the circle?

He admired her voice as well poised as her movements, as her attitudes.  He himself had always been a man of tranquil tones.  But the power of fascination had torn him out of his very nature so completely that to preserve his habitual calmness from going to pieces had become a terrible effort.

He used to go from her on board the schooner exhausted, broken, shaken up, as though he had been put to the most exquisite torture.  When he saw her approaching he always had a moment of hallucination.  She was a misty and fair creature, fitted for invisible music, for the shadows of love, for the murmurs of waters.  After a time (he could not be always staring at the ground) he would summon up all his resolution and look at her.  There was a sparkle in the clear obscurity of her eyes; and when she turned them on him they seemed to give a new meaning to life.  He would say to himself that another man would have found long before the happy release of madness, his wits burnt to cinders in that radiance.  But no such luck for him.  His wits had come unscathed through the furnaces of hot suns, of blazing deserts, of flaming angers against the weaknesses of men and the obstinate cruelties of hostile nature.

Being sane he had to be constantly on his guard against falling into adoring silences or breaking out into wild speeches.  He had to keep watch on his eyes, his limbs, on the muscles of his face.  Their conversations were such as they could be between these two people:  she a young lady fresh from the thick twilight of four million people and the artificiality of several London seasons; he the man of definite conquering tasks, the familiar of wide horizons, and in his very repose holding aloof from these agglomerations of units in which one loses one’s importance even to oneself.  They had no common conversational small change.  They had to use the great pieces of general ideas, but they exchanged them trivially.  It was no serious commerce.  Perhaps she had not much of that coin.  Nothing significant came from her.  It could not be said that she had received from the contacts of the external world impressions of a personal kind, different from other women.  What was ravishing in her was her quietness and,