The bees hummed among the heather, every now and then a little brown-streaked lizard rustled faintly beside him, a pair of kingfishers flashed across the pond.  But he saw and heard nothing, responsive as every sense in him commonly was to the details of the wild life about him.  His own miserable reverie absorbed him.  What was it that had made the charm of those early weeks in July immediately after his parting with her?  What was it which had added zest to his work, and enchantment to the summer beauty of the country, and, like a hidden harmony dimly resonant within him, had kept life tuneful and delightful?  He could put words to it now.  It had been nothing less than a settled foresight, a deep conviction, of Isabel Bretherton’s failure!  What a treachery!  But yes,—­the vision perpetually before his eyes had been the vision of a dying fame, a waning celebrity, a forsaken and discrowned beauty!  And from that abandonment and that failure he had dimly foreseen the rise and upspringing of new and indescribable joy.  He had seen her, conscious of defeat and of the inexorable limits of her own personality, turning to the man who had read her truly and yet had loved her, surely, from the very beginning, and finding in his love a fresh glory and an all-sufficient consolation.  This had been the inmost truth, the centre, the kernel of all his thought, of all his life.  He saw it now with sharp distinctness,—­now that every perception was intensified by pain and longing.

Then, as he went over the past, he saw how this consciousness had been gradually invaded and broken up by his sister’s letters.  He remembered the incredulous impatience with which he had read the earlier ones.  So, Marie thought him mistaken!  ’Isabel Bretherton would be an actress yet’—­’she had genius, after all’—­’she was learning, growing, developing every day.’  Absurd! He, had been able to keep his critical estimate of the actress and his personal admiration of the woman separate from one another.  But evidently Marie’s head had been confused, misled, by her heart.  And then, little by little, his incredulity had yielded, and his point of view had changed.  Instead of impatience of Marie’s laxity of judgment, what he had been fiercely conscious of for days was jealousy of Paul de Chateauvieux—­jealousy of his opportunities, his influence, his relation towards that keen sweet nature.  That, too, had been one of his dreams of the future,—­the dream of tutoring and training her young unformed intelligence.  He had done something towards it; he had, as it were, touched the spring which had set free all this new and unexpected store of power.  But, if he had planted, others had watered, and others would reap.  In this great crisis of her fortunes he had been nothing to her.  Other voices and other hands had guided and directed her.  Her kindly, grateful messages only stung and tortured him.  They seemed to him the merest friendly commonplace.  In reality her life had passed out of his ken; her