And now (for purely undirected impulse all within us is not, though we may be eye-bandaged agents under direction) it became necessary for an honourable gentleman to cast vehement rebukes at the fellow who did not comprehend the jewel he had won.  How could Willoughby behave like so complete a donkey!  De Craye knew him to be in his interior stiff, strange, exacting:  women had talked of him; he had been too much for one woman—­the dashing Constantia:  he had worn one woman, sacrificing far more for him than Constantia, to death.  Still, with such a prize as Clara Middleton, Willoughby’s behaviour was past calculating in its contemptible absurdity.  And during courtship!  And courtship of that girl!  It was the way of a man ten years after marriage.

The idea drew him to picture her doatingly in her young matronly bloom ten years after marriage:  without a touch of age, matronly wise, womanly sweet:  perhaps with a couple of little ones to love, never having known the love of a man.

To think of a girl like Clara Middleton never having at nine-and-twenty, and with two fair children! known the love of a man or the loving of a man, possibly, became torture to the Colonel.

For a pacification he had to reconsider that she was as yet only nineteen and unmarried.

But she was engaged, and she was unloved.  One might swear to it, that she was unloved.  And she was not a girl to be satisfied with a big house and a high-nosed husband.

There was a rapid alteration of the sad history of Clara the unloved matron solaced by two little ones.  A childless Clara tragically loving and beloved flashed across the dark glass of the future.

Either way her fate was cruel.

Some astonishment moved De Craye in the contemplation of the distance he had stepped in this morass of fancy.  He distinguished the choice open to him of forward or back, and he selected forward.  But fancy was dead:  the poetry hovering about her grew invisible to him:  he stood in the morass; that was all he knew; and momently he plunged deeper; and he was aware of an intense desire to see her face, that he might study her features again:  he understood no more.

It was the clouding of the brain by the man’s heart, which had come to the knowledge that it was caught.

A certain measure of astonishment moved him still.  It had hitherto been his portion to do mischief to women and avoid the vengeance of the sex.  What was there in Miss Middleton’s face and air to ensnare a veteran handsome man of society numbering six-and-thirty years, nearly as many conquests?  “Each bullet has got its commission.”  He was hit at last.  That accident effected by Mr. Flitch had fired the shot.  Clean through the heart, does not tell us of our misfortune, till the heart is asked to renew its natural beating.  It fell into the condition of the porcelain vase over a thought of Miss Middleton standing above his prostrate