hours, resistance seems useless.  We seize an oar, it breaks in the flood; we snatch at an overhanging bough, it snaps or slips our grasp; we utter cries for help, those on the bank pass by not hearing, or cast to us a rope the current bears out of reach.  Then we cry “Fate!” and either wring our hands, or curse, or sit and gaze straight before us, while we are swept on—­either over the cataract’s edge and dashed to fragments, or out to the trackless ocean, to be tossed by wind and wave till some bark sees and saves us—­or we sink.

From the time of his mother’s speech with him after her return from Gloucestershire, thoughts such as these passed often through Roxholm’s mind.  “It might have been; it might have been,” she had said, and the curious leap of blood and pulse he had felt had vaguely shocked him.  It scarcely seemed becoming that so young a creature as this lovely hoyden should so move a man.  ’Twas the fashion that girl beauties should be women early, and at Court he had seen young things, wives and mothers when they were scarce older; but this one seemed more than half a boy and—­and—!  Yet he knew that he had been in earnest when he had said, “I would keep away.”

“I know,” he had said to himself when he had been alone later; “I know that if the creature were a woman, ’twould be best that I should keep away—­’twould be best for any man to keep away from her, who was not free to bear any suffering his passion for her might bring him.  The man who will be chief of a great house—­whose actions affect the lives of hundreds—­is not free, even to let himself be put to the torture”—­and he smiled unconsciously the smile which was a little grim.

He had seen and studied many women, and in studying them had learned to know much of himself.  He had not been so unconscious of them as he had seemed.  Such a man must meet with adventures at any time, and at a period still tainted by the freedom of a dissolute reign, even though ’tis near twenty years past, his life, in his own despite, must contain incidents which would reveal much to the world, if related to it.  Roxholm had met with such adventures, little as they were to his taste, and had found at both foreign and English Courts that all women were not non-attacking creatures, and in discovering this had learned that a man must be a stone to resist the luring of some lovely eyes.

“I need not think myself invulnerable,” he had thought often.  “I can resist because I have loved none of them.  Had it chanced otherwise—­God have mercy on my soul!”

And now the current of his life for weeks seemed strangely set towards one being.  When he returned to London after seeing his parents depart for Italy, he met in his first walk in the city streets his erst fellow-collegian and officer, Lieutenant Thomas Tantillion, in England on leave, who almost hallooed with joy at sight of him, shaking him by the hand as if his arm had been a pump-handle, and then thrusting his own arm through it, and insisting affectionately on dragging him along the street that he might pour forth his renewed protestations of affection and the story of his adventures.