It went on, over and over.  Sometimes it varied a little, as when he thought of how, when she should tell her mother, Mrs. Pasmer must laugh.  He pictured them both laughing at him; and then Mr. Pasmer—­he had scarcely passed a dozen words with him-coming in and asking what they were laughing at, and their saying, and his laughing too.

At other times he figured them as incensed at his temerity, which must seem to them greater and greater, as now it seemed to him.  He had never thought meanly of himself, and the world so far had seemed to think well of him; but because Alice Pasmer was impossible to him, he felt that it was an unpardonable boldness in him to have dreamed of her.  What must they be saying of his having passed from the ground of society compliments and light flirtation to actually telling Alice that he loved her?

He wondered what Mrs. Pasmer had thought of his telling her that he had come to Campobello to consider the question whether he should study law or go into business, and what motive she had supposed he had in telling her that.  He asked himself what motive he had, and tried to pretend that he had none.  He dramatised conversations with Mrs. Pasmer in which he laughed it off.

Ho tried to remember all that had passed the day before at the picnic, and whether Alice had done or said anything to encourage him, and he could not find that she had.  All her trust and freedom was because she felt perfectly safe with him from any such disgusting absurdity as he had been guilty of.  The ride home through the mist, with its sweet intimacy, that parting which had seemed so full of tender intelligence, were parts of the same illusion.  There had been nothing of it on her side from the beginning but a kindliness which he had now flung away for ever.

He went back to the beginning, and tried to remember the point where he had started in this fatal labyrinth of error.  She had never misled him, but he had misled himself from the first glimpse of her.

Whatever was best in his light nature, whatever was generous and self-denying, came out in this humiliation.  From the vision of her derision he passed to a picture of her suffering from pity for him, and wrung with a sense of the pain she had given him.  He promised himself to write to her, and beg her not to care for him, because he was not worthy of that.  He framed a letter in his mind, in which he posed in some noble attitudes, and brought tears into his eyes by his magnanimous appeal to her not to suffer for the sake of one so unworthy of her serious thought.  He pictured her greatly moved by some of the phrases, and he composed for her a reply, which led to another letter from him, and so to a correspondence and a long and tender friendship.  In the end he died suddenly, and then she discovered that she had always loved him.  He discovered that he was playing the fool again, and he rose from the berth where he had tumbled himself.  The state-room had that smell of parboiled paint which state-rooms have, and reminded him of the steamer in which he had gone to Europe when a boy, with the family, just after his mother’s health began to fail.