But just as he was going out he passed her, and hardly looked at her, thinking he had offended her; but she came and put out her hand quickly, and said, almost pathetically—­

“You must forgive me for my behaviour to-night, Mr. Hamilton.  What you said was not true, but you meant it to be true; you believed it.  And please don’t stop talking to me openly.  I value it very much.  I have so few people to tell me the truth.”

I find this conversation narrated in his diary, almost word for word as I have given it.  But there is omitted from it, necessarily perhaps, the most pregnant comment of all.

“And yet,” he said to me once, as he turned to leave the room after commenting upon their freedom of speech with one another, “I am not in love with her, though I can’t think why I am not.”

The sequel must be soon told.  Miss B——­ suddenly accepted a gentleman who was in every way a suitable parti:  heir to a peerage, of fairly high character.

But to return to Arthur.  I can not do better than quote a few sentences of a letter he wrote to me on the event.  It conceals—­as he was wont to do—­strong feeling under the bantering tone.

“As you are in possession of most of my moral and mental diagnoses, I had better communicate to you a new and disturbing element.  You remember what I said to you about Miss B——­, that I did not care for her.  A fancied immunity is often a premonitory symptom of disease:  the system is excited into an instantaneous glow by the first contact of the poisonous seed.

“I don’t know, at present, quite how things are with me.  I labour under a great oppression of spirit.  I have a strange thirsty longing to see her face and hear her speech.  If I could only hear from herself that she had done what her best self—­of which we have often spoken—­ratifies, I should feel more content.  But she trusts her impulses too much; and the habit of loving all she loves with passion, blinds her a little.  A woman who loves her sister, her pets, the very sunshine and air with passion, hardly knows what a lover is.  I can not help feeling that I might have shown her a little better than J——.  Still one must accept facts and interpret them, especially in cases where one has not even been allowed to try and fail; for I never spoke to her a word of love.  Ah, well! perhaps I shall be stronger soon.”

CHAPTER VIII

Arthur Hamilton as an author

I must give a chapter to this subject, because it entered very largely into Arthur’s life, although he was singularly unsuccessful as an author, considering the high level of his mental powers.

He lacked somehow, not exactly the gift of expression—­his letters testify to that—­but the gift of proportion and combination.

His essays are disjointed—­discursive and eloquent in parts, and bare and meagre in others.  Connections are omitted, passages of real and rare beauty jostling with long passages of the most common-place rhetoric.  His platitudes, however, to myself who knew him, have a genuine ring about them; he never admitted a truism into his writing till it had become his own by vivid realization.  As he himself says: