For any one save a lover—­thwarted as I was, and perturbed by the shadow falling on the princess—­my father’s Aplomb and promptness in conjuring a check to what he assumed to be a premeditated piece of villany on the part of Baroness Turckems, might have seemed tolerably worthy of admiration.  Me the whole scene affected as if it had burnt my skin.  I loathed that picture of him, constantly present to me, of his shivering the glass of Ottilia’s semi-classical night-lamp, gravely asking her pardon, and stretching the flame to the curtain, with large eyes blazing on the baroness.  The stupid burlesque majesty of it was unendurable to thought.  Nevertheless, I had to thank him for shielding Ottilia, and I had to brood on the fact that I had drawn her into a situation requiring such a shield.  He, meanwhile, according to his habit, was engaged in reviewing the triumphs to come.  ‘We have won a princess!’ And what England would say, how England would look, when, on a further journey, I brought my princess home, entirely occupied his imagination, to my excessive torture—­a state of mind for which it was impossible to ask his mercy.  His sole link with the past appeared to be this notion that he had planned all the good things in store for us.  Consequently I was condemned to hear of the success of the plot, until—­for I had not the best of consciences—­I felt my hand would be spell-bound in the attempt to write to the princess; and with that sense of incapacity I seemed to be cut loose from her, drifting back into the desolate days before I saw her wheeled in her invalid chair along the sands and my life knew sunrise.

But whatever the mood of our affections, so it is with us island wanderers:  we cannot gaze over at England, knowing the old country to be close under the sea-line, and not hail it, and partly forget ourselves in the time that was.  The smell of sea-air made me long for the white cliffs, the sight of the white cliffs revived pleasant thoughts of Riversley, and thoughts of Riversley thoughts of Janet, which were singularly and refreshingly free from self-accusations.  Some love for my home, similar to what one may have for Winter, came across me, and some appreciation of Janet as well, in whose society was sure to be at least myself, a creature much reduced in altitude, but without the cramped sensations of a man on a monument.  My hearty Janet!  I thanked her then for seeing me of my natural height.

Some hours after parting with my father in London, I lay down to sleep in my old home, feeling as if I had thrown off a coat of armour.  I awoke with a sailor’s song on my lips.  Looking out of window at the well-known features of the heaths and dark firs, and waning oak copses, and the shadowy line of the downs stretching their long whale backs South to West, it struck me that I had been barely alive of late.  Indeed one who consents to live as I had done, in a hope and a retrospect, will find his life slipping between the two, like the ships