Once written, I dared not read the letter over.  I thrust it under her door, and in less than five minutes was on my way to the station.

* * * * *

CHAPTER LIII.

THE FADING OF THE RAINBOW.

     I loved a love once, fairest among women;
     Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her—­
     All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

     LAMB.

Beautifully and truly, in the fourth book of the most poetical of stories, has a New World romancist described the state of a sorrowing lover.  “All around him,” saith he, “seemed dreamy and vague; all within him, as in a sun’s eclipse.  As the moon, whether visible or invisible, has power over the tides of the ocean, so the face of that lady, whether present or absent, had power over the tides of his soul, both by day and night, both waking and sleeping.  In every pale face and dark eye he saw a resemblance to her; and what the day denied him in reality, the night gave him in dreams.”

Such was, very faithfully, my own condition of mind during the interval which succeeded my departure from Paris—­the only difference being that Longfellow’s hero was rejected by the woman he loved, and sorrowing for that rejection; whilst I, neither rejected nor accepted, mourned another grief, and through the tears of that trouble, looked forward anxiously to my uncertain future.

I reached Saxonholme the night before my father’s funeral, and remained there for ten days.  I found myself, to my surprise, almost a rich man—­that is to say, sufficiently independent to follow the bent of my inclinations as regarded the future.

My first impulse, on learning the extent of my means, was to relinquish a career that had been from the first distasteful to me—­my second was to leave the decision to Hortense.  To please her, to be worthy of her, to prove my devotion to her, was what I most desired upon earth.  If she wished to see me useful and active in my generation, I would do my best to be so for her sake—­if, on the contrary, she only cared to see me content, I would devote myself henceforth to that life of “retired leisure” that I had always coveted.  Could man love more honestly and heartily?

One year of foreign life had wrought a marked difference in me.  I had not observed it so much in Paris; but here, amid old scenes and old reminiscences, I seemed to meet the image of my former self, and wondered at the change ’twixt now and then.  I left home, timid, ignorant of the world and its ways, reserved, silent, almost misanthropic.  I came back strengthened mentally and physically.  Studious as ever, I could yet contemplate an active career without positive repugnance; I knew how to meet and treat my fellow-men; I was acquainted with society in its most refined and most homely phases.  I had tasted of pleasure, of disappointment, of love—­of all that makes life earnest.