“Perhaps,” said my Lord Dunstanwolde, “perhaps her mind has changed and ’tis true she intends to live more gravely.”

“Nay,” answered Lord Twemlow, with a troubled countenance.  “No such good fortune.  She doth not intend to keep it up—­and how could she if she would?  A girl who hath lived as she hath, seeing no decent company and with not a woman about her—­though for that matter they say she has the eye of a hawk and the wit of a dozen women, and the will to do aught she chooses.  But surely she could not keep it up!”

“Another woman could not,” said Osmonde.  “A woman who had not a clear, strong brain and a wondrous determination—­a woman who was weak or a fool, or even as other women, could not.  But surely—­for all her youth—­there is no other woman like her.”

CHAPTER XV

“And ’twas the town rake and beauty—­Sir John Oxon”

That night he lay almost till ’twas morning, his eyes open upon the darkness, since he could not sleep, finding it impossible to control the thoughts which filled his mind.  ’Twas a night whose still long hours he never could forget in the years that followed, and ’twas not a memory which was a happy one.  He passed through many a curious phase of thought, and more than once felt a pang of sorrow that he was now alone as he had never thought of being, and that if suffering came, his silent endurance of it must be a new thing.  To be silent because one does not wish to speak is a different matter from being silent because one knows no creature dear and near enough to hear the story of one’s trouble.  He realised now that the tender violet eyes which death had closed would have wooed from his reserve many a thing it might have been good to utter in words.

“She would always have understood,” he thought.  “She understood when she cried out, ‘It might have been!’”

He clasped his hands behind his head and lay so, smiling with mingled bitterness and joy.

“It has begun!” he said.  “I have heard them tell of it—­of how one woman’s face came back again and again, of how one pair of eyes would look into a man’s and would not leave him, nor let him rest.  It has begun for me, too.  For good or evil, it has begun.”

Until this night he had told himself, and believed himself in the telling, that he had been strangely haunted by thoughts of a strange creature, because the circumstances by which she was encompassed were so unusual and romantic as would have lingered in the mind of any man whether old or young; and this he had been led to feel the more confident of, since he was but one of a dozen men, and indeed each one who knew of her existence appeared to regard her as the heroine of a play, though so far it was to them but a rattling comedy.  But from this night he knew a different thing, and realised that he was face to face with that mystery which all men do not encounter, some only meeting with the mere fleeting image of it and never knowing what the reality is—­that mystery which may be man’s damnation or his heaven, his torture and heart-sickening, or his life and strength and bliss.  What his would bring to him, or bring him to, he knew not in the least, and had at times a pang at thought of it, but sometimes such a surge of joy as made him feel himself twice man instead of once.