This postcard disturbed Kendal not a little, and he felt irritably that somebody had mismanaged matters.  He had supposed, and indeed suggested, that Miss Bretherton should enclose his note in one of her own to his sister’s Paris address, giving, at the same time, some indication of a place of meeting in Venice.  But if she had not done this, it was very possible that the two women might miss each other after all.  Sometimes, when he had been contemplating this possibility with disgust, he would with a great effort make himself reflect why it was that he cared about the matter so disproportionately.  Why was he so deeply interested in Isabel Bretherton’s movements abroad, and in the meeting which would bring her, so to speak, once more into his own world?  Why! because it was impossible, he would answer himself indignantly, not to feel a profound interest in any woman who had ever shared as much emotion with you as she had with him in those moments at Nuneham, who had received a wound at your hands, had winced under it, and still had remained gracious, and kind, and womanly!  ‘I should be a hard-hearted brute,’ he said to himself, ’if I did not feel a very deep and peculiar interest in her—­if I did not desire that Marie’s friendship should abundantly make up to her for my blundering!’

Did he ever really deceive himself into imagining that this was all?  It is difficult to say.  The mind of a man no longer young, and trained in all the subtleties of thought, does not deal with an invading sentiment exactly as a youth would do with all his experience to come.  It steals upon him more slowly, he is capable of disguising it to himself longer, of escaping from it into other interests.  Passion is in its ultimate essence the same, wherever it appears and under whatever conditions, but it possesses itself of human life in different ways.  Slowly, and certainly, the old primeval fire, the commonest, fatalest, divinest force of life, was making its way into Kendal’s nature.  But it was making its way against antagonistic forces of habit, tradition, self-restraint,—­it found a hundred other interests in possession;—­it had a strange impersonality and timidity of nature to fight with.  Kendal had been accustomed to live in other men’s lives.  Was he only just beginning to live his own?

But, however it was, he was at least conscious during this waiting time that life was full of some hidden savour; that his thoughts were never idle, never vacant; that, as he lay flat among the fern in his moments of rest, following the march of the clouds as they sailed divinely over the rich breadth and colour of the commons, a whole brood of images nestled at his heart, or seemed to hover in the sunny air before him,—­visions of a slender form fashioned with Greek suppleness and majesty, of a soft and radiant presence, of looks all womanliness, and gestures all grace, of a smile like no other he had ever seen for charm, of a quick impulsive gait!  He followed that figure through