But to the adventurous lover that brief light had revealed his doubtful way clear before him.  He saw, with a thrill of exultation, that henceforth he had really nothing to fear from such womanly defences as he had counted on,—­coldness, prejudice, disdain,—­that all he had taken for these were but unsubstantial shadows.  Still he showed no premature triumph in word or look, but remained silent and humble, waiting the reply to his passionate appeal, as though life or death, in very truth, were depending upon it.  And Zelma spoke at last,—­briefly and coldly, but in a manner neither suspicious nor unfriendly.  She herself, she said, was unconventional, in her instincts, at least,—­so could afford to pardon somewhat of lawlessness in another,—­especially, she added, with a shy smile, in one whom Melpomene, rather than Cupid, had made mad.  Still she was not a Juliet, though he, for all she knew, might be a Romeo; and only in lands verging on the tropics, or in the soul of a poet, could a passion like that of the gentle Veronese spring up, bud, and blossom, in a single night.  As for her, the fogs of England, the heavy chill of its social atmosphere, had obstructed the ripening sunshine of romance and repressed the flowering of the heart—­

“And kept your beautiful nature all the more pure and fresh!” exclaimed Mr. Lawrence Bury, with real or well-assumed enthusiasm; but Zelma, replying to his interruption only by a slight blush, went on to say, that she had been taught that poetry, art, and romances were all idle pastimes and perilous lures, unbecoming and unwholesome to a young English gentlewoman, whose manifest destiny it was to tread the dull, beaten track of domestic duty, with spirit chastened and conformed.  She had had, she would acknowledge, some aspirations and rebellious repinings, some wild day-dreams of life of another sort; but it was best that she should put these down,—­yes, doubtless, best that she should fall into her place in the ranks of duty and staid respectability, and be a mere gentlewoman, like the rest.—­Here a slight shrug of the shoulders and curl of the lip contradicted her words,—­yet, with a tone of rigid determination, she added, that it was also best she should cherish no tastes and form no associations which might distract her imagination and further turn her heart from this virtuous resolution; and therefore must she say farewell, firmly and finally, to the, she doubted not, most worthy gentleman who had done her the honor to entertain for her sentiments of such high consideration and romantic devotion.  She would not deny that his intrusion on her privacy had, at first, startled and displeased her,—­but she already accepted it as an eccentricity of dramatic genius, a thoughtless offence, and, being, as she trusted, at once the first and the last, pardonable.  She wished him happiness, fame, fortune,—­and a very good morning!  Then, with a wave of the hand which would have done honor to Oldfield herself, she turned and walked proudly up the lane.