’Dear Mr. Hammond,—­Lady Maulevrier desires me to say that the proposal which you honoured me by making this morning is one which I cannot possibly accept, and that any idea of an engagement between you and me could result only in misery and humiliation to both.  She thinks it best, under these circumstances, that we should not again meet, and I shall therefore have left Fellside before you receive this letter.

    ’With all good wishes, very faithfully yours,

    ‘LESBIA HASELDEN.’

’Very faithfully mine—­faithful to her false training, to the worldly mind that rules her; faithful to the gods of this world—­Belial and Mammon, and the Moloch Fashion.  Poor cowardly soul!  She loves me, and owns as much, yet weakly flies from me, afraid to trust the strong arm and the brave heart of the man who loves her, preferring the glittering shams of the world to the reality of true and honest love.  Well, child, I have weighed you in the balance and found you wanting.  Would to God it had been otherwise!  If you had been brave and bold for love’s sake, where is that pure and perfect chrysolite for which I would have bartered you?’

He flung himself into a chair, and sat with his head bowed upon his folded arms, and his eyes not innocent of tears.  What would he not have given to find truth and courage and scorn of the world’s wealth in that heart which he had tried to win.  Did he think her altogether heartless because she so glibly renounced him?  No, he was too just for that.  He called her only half-hearted.  She was like the cat in the adage, ‘Letting I dare not, wait upon I would.’  But he told himself with one deep sigh of resignation that she was lost to him for ever.

‘I have tried her, and found her not worth the winning,’ he said.

The house, even the lovely landscape smiling under his windows, the pastoral valley, smooth lake and willowy island, seemed hateful to him.  He felt himself hemmed round by those green hills, by yonder brown and rugged wall of Nabb Scar, stifled for want of breathing space.  The landscape was lovely enough, but it was like a beautiful grave.  He longed to get away from it.

‘Another man would follow her to St. Bees,’ he said.  ‘I will not.’

He flung a few things into a Gladstone bag, sat down, and wrote a brief note to Maulevrier, asking him to make his excuses to her ladyship.  He had made up his mind to go to Keswick that afternoon, and would rejoin his friend to-morrow, at Carlisle.  This done, he rang for Maulevrier’s valet, and asked that person to look after his luggage and bring it on to Scotland with his master’s things; and then, without a word of adieu to anyone, John Hammond went out of the house, with the Gladstone bag in his hand, and shook the dust of Fellside off his feet.

He ordered a fly at the Prince of Wales’s Hotel, and drove to Keswick, whence he went on to the Lodore.  The gloom and spaciousness of Derwentwater, grey in the gathering dusk, suited his humour better than the emerald prettiness of Grasmere—­the roar of the waterfall made music in his ear.  He dined in a private room, and spent the evening roaming on the shores of the lake, and at eleven o’clock went back to his hotel and sat late into the night reading Heine, and thinking of the girl who had refused him.