boy.  Only now it was not mere cloudy, impossible dreams of renown, of rescuing the whole family from a burning house, that filled his mind, but reconstructions of the time with Blanche....  If he had said this or that, something different from what he had said; if only, if only....  And if she were to come back, how he would forget all he had said about it being impossible to go on as they were in uncertainty—­how willingly would he catch at any excuse for trying it all over again.  He would plan that too, till sometimes his vivid imaginings would for a few moments almost deceive himself, and he would realise, with a pang whose sharpness turned him sick and banished sleep, that it was all only the pretence of a child.

Nevertheless, he did not succumb to the temptation to write to her, probably because in his inmost heart he knew too well that if she wanted him she would write—­on some other excuse.  He had been in a curious way clear-sighted about her from the first; he had always acknowledged that strain of insincerity, but he had fallen into the error of believing that underneath all those shifting sands there was at last bedrock and that it was his hand which was to discover it.  He now knew that it was nothing but sands, and a quicksand at that, yet the knowledge made the death of his love no easier.  Love cannot be killed—­it always dies a natural death; and natural deaths are slow processes.  Of all the things Blanche had said to him one at least was very true, and that was on a day when he had been telling her the many reasons why he loved her.  Her mouth, her eyes, her soul, her voice, it had been the usual lover’s medley.  She had listened, and then perhaps, with the knowledge in her heart that disillusionment was bound to be his, said: 

“There’s only one safe reason for loving anyone, Ishmael, and that is—­’because I am I and you are you!’...  Love a person for beauty or brains or virtues, and they may all fail—­there’s only the one reason that may be trusted not to change.”  And that was, of course, precisely why he had loved her, and why the love died harder than the reasoned loves of older years which respond to reasoning.

Affairs at home were not likely to provide a pleasurable change for Ishmael’s thoughts.  Vassie, it was true, meant more to him, as he to her, than ever before.  The pain that Vassie had suffered when Killigrew had left after his first visit, though not comparable to Ishmael’s, being disappointment and hurt vanity, yet had dowered her with a degree of comprehension she might otherwise have missed.  She felt she loved this young brother more dearly than she had ever thought to; something of the maternal awoke in her; she helped him in many little ways he did not notice, getting between him and their mother’s tongue, exerting herself to make the affairs within the house run more smoothly.  She was proud of her youngest brother, of his unlikeness to the rest, even of the aloofness and fits of dreaming which she no more than the others understood, but which she was sufficiently in advance of them to revere instead of scorning.  She was more like him than she knew, though in her ambition had taken harder and more personal form.