But he had put an end to that relationship; he had broken the immaterial, intangible link.  It was as if he had given a body to some delicate and spiritual dream, and destroyed it in a furious embrace.  And in destroying it he had destroyed everything.

Then he reflected that though this deed seemed to belong wholly to the present moment, it had in reality been done a long time before, when he first became the slave of that absurd and execrable passion for Miss Poppy Grace.  Rickman the poet had believed in Love, the immortal and invincible, the highest of high divinities, and as such had celebrated him in song.  But he had been unfortunate in his first actual experience of him.  He had found him, not “pacing Heaven’s golden floor,” but staggering across Miss Grace’s drawing-room, a most offensive, fifth-rate, disreputable little god.  Of course he knew it wasn’t the same thing, it wasn’t the same thing at all.  But he was bound by his past.  He had forged a chain of infamous but irresistible association that degraded love in his eyes, that in his thoughts degraded her.  Every hour that he had spent in the little dancer’s society had its kindred with this hour.  In his passion for Lucia Harden there leapt up the passion of that night—­that night three weeks ago.  It was then—­then—­that he had sinned against her.

He had not meant—­he had not meant to love her—­like that.  And yet he perceived how all along, unremittently, imperceptibly, this passion had waylaid him and misled him and found him out.  It was it that had drawn him every morning across the fields to Court House, that upheld him on his giddy perch on the library steps, that chained him to his chair at the library table and kept him sweating over that abominable catalogue till four o’clock in the morning.  It had looked at him with so pure and spiritual a face that he had not recognized it.  But how otherwise could he have stayed here for three weeks, fooling with that unlucky conscience of his; persuading it one minute that he had nothing to do with Miss Harden, and that her father’s affairs were no business of his, the next that they were so much his business that he was bound not to betray them; while as for Miss Harden, he had so much to do with her that it was his duty to stay where he was and protect her?  He had had absolutely no duty in the matter except to tell her the truth and clear out.

Telling the truth—­it ought to have been easy for him who was so truthful, so passionately sincere.  And yet almost anything would have been easier, for the next step to telling the truth was going away.  Of course he had suffered in staying, but he would have suffered anything rather than go.

It had been so insidious.  His feet had been caught in a net so fine that he had thought it woven of the hairs split by an exceedingly acute and subtle conscience.  He should have stood still and snapt them one by one; but he had struggled, until he was so entangled that he could not get out.  And now he perceived that the net which seemed so fine was the strong net woven by desire.  All his subtle reasonings, his chivalry, his delicacy, his sincerity itself, could be reduced to this simple and contemptible element.  Positively, his whole character, as he now contemplated it seemed to slip away from him and dissolve in the irresistible stream, primeval, monstrous, indestructible.