Admonished by his conscience, John’s hilarity clouded into a sort of semi-humorous gravity, and he advised Mike on the necessity of reforming his life.

“I am very sorry, for there is no one whose society is as attractive to me as yours; there is no one in whom I find so many of my ideas, and yet there is no one from whom I am so widely separated; at times you are sublime, and then you turn round and roll in the nastiest dirt you can find.”

Mike loved a lecture from John, and he exerted himself to talk.

Looking at each other in admiration, they regretted the other’s weaknesses.  Mike deplored John’s conscience, which had forced him to burn his poems; John deplored Mike’s unsteady mind, which veered and yielded to every passion.  And in the hall they talked of the great musician and the great king, or John played the beautiful hymns of the Russian Church, in whose pathetic charm he declared Chopin had found his inspiration; they spoke of the Grail and the Romance of the Swan, or, wandering into the library, they read aloud the ever-flowering eloquence of De Quincey, the marmoreal loveliness of Landor, the nurselike tenderness of Tennyson.

Through all these aestheticisms Lily Young shone, her light waxing to fulness day by day.  Mike had written to Frank, beseeching him to forward any letters that might arrive.  He expected an answer from Lily within the week, and not until its close did he begin to grow fearful.  Then rapidly his fear increased and unable to bear with so much desire in the presence of John Norton, he rushed to London, and thence to Marlow.  He railed against his own weakness in going to Marlow, for if a letter had arrived it would have been forwarded to him.

“Why deceive myself with false hopes?  If the letter had miscarried it would have been returned through the post-office.  I wrote my address plain enough.”  Then he railed against Lily.  “The little vixen!  She will show that letter; she will pass it round; perhaps at this moment she is laughing at me!  What a fool I was to write it!  However, all’s well that ends well, and I am not going to be married—­I have escaped after all.”

The train jogged like his thoughts, and the landscape fled in fleeting visions like his dreams.  He laid his face in his hands, and could not disguise the truth that he desired her above all things, for she was the sweetest he had seen.

“There are,” he said, talking to Frank and Lizzie, “two kinds of love—­the first is a strictly personal appetite, which merely seeks its own assuagement; the second draws you out of yourself, and is far more terrible.  I have found both these loves, but in different women.”

“Did no woman ever inspire both loves in you?” said Lizzie.

“I thought one woman had.”

“Oh, tell us about her.”