Thy sweet composure, and thy heart dismay? 
   Perhaps some murderer’s cruel eye agleam
   Is fixed upon me, or some monstrous dream
     Might bring such fearful guilt upon the head
       Of my unvigilant soul as would arouse
     The Borgian snake from her envenomed bed,
       Or startle Nero in his golden house.

“Good stuff,” Reginald remarked, laying down the manuscript; “when did you write it?”

“The night when you were out of town,” Ernest rejoined.

“I see,” Reginald replied.

There was something startling in his intonation that at once aroused Ernest’s attention.

“What do you see?” he asked quickly.

“Nothing,” Reginald replied, with immovable calm, “only that your state of nerves is still far from satisfactory.”

XVIII

After Ernest’s departure Ethel Brandenbourg’s heart was swaying hither and thither in a hurricane of conflicting feelings.  Before she had time to gain an emotional equilibrium, his letter had hurled her back into chaos.  A false ring somewhere in Ernest’s words, reechoing with an ever-increasing volume of sound, stifled the voice of love.  His jewelled sentences glittered, but left her cold.  They lacked that spontaneity which renders even simple and hackeneyed phrases wonderful and unique.  Ethel clearly realised that her hold upon the boy’s imagination had been a fleeting midsummer night’s charm, and that a word from Reginald’s lips had broken the potency of her spell.  She almost saw the shadow of Reginald’s visage hovering over Ernest’s letter and leering at her from between the lines in sinister triumph.  Finally reason came and whispered to her that it was extremely unwise to give her heart into the keeping of a boy.  His love, she knew, would have been exacting, irritating at times.  He would have asked her to sympathise with every phase of his life, and would have expected active interest on her part in much that she had done with long ago.  Thus, untruth would have stolen into her life and embittered it.  When mates are unequal, Love must paint its cheeks and, in certain moods at least, hide its face under a mask.  Its lips may be honeyed, but it brings fret and sorrow in its train.

These things she told herself over and over again while she penned a cool and calculating answer to Ernest’s letter.  She rewrote it many times, and every time it became more difficult to reply.  At last she put her letter aside for a few days, and when it fell again into her hand it seemed so unnatural and strained that she destroyed it.