By just closing his eyes he could see her standing there with the firelight glow on her red frock; could feel again that marvellous thrill when she pressed herself against him in the half-innocent, seducing moment when she first came in; could feel again her eyes drawing—­drawing him!  She was a witch, a grey-eyed, brown-haired witch—­even unto her love of red.  She had the witch’s power of lighting fever in the veins.  And he simply wondered at himself, that he had not, as she stood there in the firelight, knelt, and put his arms round her and pressed his face against her waist.  Why had he not?  But he did not want to think; the moment thought began he knew he must be torn this way and that, tossed here and there between reason and desire, pity and passion.  Every sense struggled to keep him wrapped in the warmth and intoxication of this discovery that he, in the full of Autumn, had awakened love in Spring.  It was amazing that she could have this feeling; yet there was no mistake.  Her manner to Sylvia just now had been almost dangerously changed; there had been a queer cold impatience in her look, frightening from one who but three months ago had been so affectionate.  And, going away, she had whispered, with that old trembling-up at him, as if offering to be kissed:  “I may come, mayn’t I?  And don’t be angry with me, please; I can’t help it.”  A monstrous thing at his age to let a young girl love him—­compromise her future!  A monstrous thing by all the canons of virtue and gentility!  And yet—­what future?—­with that nature—­those eyes—­ that origin—­with that father, and that home?  But he would not—­ simply must not think!

Nevertheless, he showed the signs of thought, and badly; for after dinner Sylvia, putting her hand on his forehead, said: 

“You’re working too hard, Mark.  You don’t go out enough.”

He held those fingers fast.  Sylvia!  No, indeed he must not think!  But he took advantage of her words, and said that he would go out and get some air.

He walked at a great pace—­to keep thought away—­till he reached the river close to Westminster, and, moved by sudden impulse, seeking perhaps an antidote, turned down into that little street under the big Wren church, where he had never been since the summer night when he lost what was then more to him than life.  There she had lived; there was the house—­those windows which he had stolen past and gazed at with such distress and longing.  Who lived there now?  Once more he seemed to see that face out of the past, the dark hair, and dark soft eyes, and sweet gravity; and it did not reproach him.  For this new feeling was not a love like that had been.  Only once could a man feel the love that passed all things, the love before which the world was but a spark in a draught of wind; the love that, whatever dishonour, grief, and unrest it might come through, alone had in it the heart of peace and joy and honour.  Fate had torn that love from him, nipped it off as