But he was mistaken in his diagnosis of the symptoms.  The book that Lucian had begun lay unheeded in the drawer; it was a secret work that he was engaged on, and the manuscripts that he took out of that inner pocket never left him day or night.  He slept with them next to his heart, and he would kiss them when he was quite alone, and pay them such devotion as he would have paid to her whom they symbolized.  He wrote on these leaves a wonderful ritual of praise and devotion; it was the liturgy of his religion.  Again and again he copied and recopied this madness of a lover; dallying all days over the choice of a word, searching for more exquisite phrases.  No common words, no such phrases as he might use in a tale would suffice; the sentences of worship must stir and be quickened, they must glow and burn, and be decked out as with rare work of jewelry.  Every part of that holy and beautiful body must be adored; he sought for terms of extravagant praise, he bent his soul and mind low before her, licking the dust under her feet, abased and yet rejoicing as a Templar before the image of Baphomet.  He exulted more especially in the knowledge that there was nothing of the conventional or common in his ecstasy; he was not the fervent, adoring lover of Tennyson’s poems, who loves with passion and yet with a proud respect, with the love always of a gentleman for a lady.  Annie was not a lady; the Morgans had farmed their land for hundreds of years; they were what Miss Gervase and Miss Colley and the rest of them called common people.  Tennyson’s noble gentleman thought of their ladies with something of reticence; they imagined them dressed in flowing and courtly robes, walking with slow dignity; they dreamed of them as always stately, the future mistresses of their houses, mothers of their heirs.  Such lovers bowed, but not too low, remembering their own honor, before those who were to be equal companions and friends as well as wives.  It was not such conceptions as these that he embodied in the amazing emblems of his ritual; he was not, he told himself, a young officer, “something in the city,” or a rising barrister engaged to a Miss Dixon or a Miss Gervase.  He had not thought of looking out for a nice little house in a good residential suburb where they would have pleasant society; there were to be no consultations about wall-papers, or jocose whispers from friends as to the necessity of having a room that would do for a nursery.  No glad young thing had leant on his arm while they chose the suite in white enamel, and china for “our bedroom,” the modest salesman doing his best to spare their blushes.  When Edith Gervase married she would get mamma to look out for two really good servants, “as we must begin quietly,” and mamma would make sure that the drains and everything were right.  Then her “girl friends” would come on a certain solemn day to see all her “lovely things.”  “Two dozen of everything!” “Look, Ethel, did you ever see such ducky frills?”