Hubert could not remember a time when he had not been in love.  The objects of his devotion had succeeded each other rapidly, but each in her turn was the perfect woman.  His imagination cast a halo about a beautiful head, and hastened to see in its possessor all the poetry of character which he aspired to worship.  In his loves, as in every other circumstance of life, he would have nothing of compromise; for him the world contained nothing but his passion, and existence had no other end.  Between that past and this present more intervened than Hubert could yet appreciate; but he judged the change in himself by the light in which that early love appeared to him.  Those were the restless ardours of boyhood:  he could not henceforth trifle so with solemn meanings.  The ideal was harder of discovery than he had thought; perhaps it was not to be found in the world at all.  But what less perfect could henceforth touch his heart?

Yet throughout his convalescence he thought often of Adela, perhaps because she was so near, and because she doubtless often thought of him.  His unexpected meeting with her on Stanbury Hill affected him strangely:  the world was new to his eyes, and the girl’s face seemed to share in the renewal; it was not quite the same face that he had held in memory, but had a fresh significance.  He read in her looks more than formerly he had been able to see.  This impression was strengthened by his interview with her on the following day.  Had she too grown much older in a few months?

After spending a fortnight with his mother at Agworth, he went to London, and for a time thought as little of Adela as of any other woman.  New interests claimed him, interests purely intellectual, the stronger that his mind seemed just aroused from a long sleep.  He threw himself into various studies with more zeal than he had hitherto devoted to such interests; not that he had as yet any definite projects, but solely because it was his nature to be in pursuit of some excellence and to scorn mere acquiescence in a life of every-day colour.  He lived all but in loneliness, and when the change had had time to work upon him his thoughts began to revert to Adela, to her alone of those who stood on the other side of the gulf.  She came before his eyes as a vision of purity; it was soothing to picture her face and to think of her walking in the spring meadows.  He thought of her as of a white rose, dew-besprent, and gently swayed by the sweet air of a sunny morning; a white rose newly spread, its heart virgin from the hands of shaping Nature.  He could not decide what quality, what absence of thought, made Adela so distinct to him.  Was it perhaps the exquisite delicacy apparent in all she did or said?  Even the most reverent thought seemed gross in touching her; the mind flitted round about her, kept from contact by a supreme modesty, which she alone could inspire If her head were painted, it must be against the tenderest eastern sky; all associations with her were of the morning, when heatless rays strike level across the moist earth, of simple devoutness which renders thanks for the blessing of a new day, of mercy robed like the zenith at dawn.