In London he had never felt any temptation to go with Killigrew when that young man frankly announced his intention of making a night of it with some girl he had picked up at the Cafe Riche or Cremorne; distaste had been his dominant instinct, yet many of the suggestive things he had apparently passed through unscathed came crowding back on him now.  When he was not actually driving himself to physical labour his mind would fill with pictures that he was able to conjure up without knowing how; sometimes Blanche would partner him in those imaginings, sometimes some stranger woman of his invention.  He felt ashamed of these ideas, but that did not prevent them coming, and sometimes he would deliberately give way and allow himself hours to elaborate them, from which he would rouse himself worn out and fevered.  From these mental orgies he would feel so intense a reaction of disgust that he knew how keenly he would feel the same if he gave way actually, in some hidden house by Penzance harbour, where men that he knew sometimes went.  Physical satisfaction and the fact that Nature had been allowed her way would not have saved him from the aftermath, and he did not delude himself that it would.  He looked sometimes at John-James, sitting so placidly opposite him at meals, and wondered about him, whether his physical nature did not perhaps follow his mental and remain untroubled.  Yet this thing seemed in every man....  He wondered, but never asked, and, by dint of hard work and a resolute cleansing of his mind, kept the thing at bay.

The summer was a singularly perfect one, and the contrast between its emptiness and that time only a year ago when he came down from London and was expecting Blanche to follow, pricked him at every turn.  He felt convinced he no longer cared for Blanche; he was regaining interest in the world without, but she had left this legacy of reaction behind her.  He told himself that this too must be borne with, but all the time his youth and natural disposition to get all that was possible out of life were preparing him for fresh enterprise.  He could no longer be happy over nothing but the sheer joy of life, yet simple pleasures began to appeal to him once more, as Boase noted thankfully.  The daily expectation, that absurd delicious hope, that “something” would happen, had not yet deserted him, and once again he began to live on it.

One day there arrived a letter from Vassie—­a letter written in superlatives, a letter that made Ishmael and John-James both feel relief in their different ways and that made the Parson very glad.  Vassie had achieved her end, the great end of mid-Victorian womanhood, and more vital to her even than most—­she was engaged to be married, and to a man whose social position seemed, as far as her judgment could be trusted, satisfactory.  Mr. Daniel O’Connell Flynn was, according to Vassie, more than she could have dared hope for, and if she said little as to any personal feelings for him, Ishmael knew how unimportant that