She hoped he would not come to Mount Laurels, thinking she should esteem him less if he did; knowing that her defence of him, on her own behalf, against herself, depended now on an esteem lodged perhaps in her wilfulness.  Yet if he did not come, what an Arctic world!

He came on a November afternoon when the woods glowed, and no sun.  The day was narrowed in mist from earth to heaven:  a moveless and possessing mist.  It left space overhead for one wreath of high cloud mixed with touches of washed red upon moist blue, still as the mist, insensibly passing into it.  Wet webs crossed the grass, chill in the feeble light.  The last flowers of the garden bowed to decay.  Dead leaves, red and brown and spotted yellow, fell straight around the stems of trees, lying thick.  The glow was universal, and the chill.

Cecilia sat sketching the scene at a window of her study, on the level of the drawing-room, and he stood by outside till she saw him.  He greeted her through the glass, then went round to the hall door, giving her time to recover, if only her heart had been less shaken.

Their meeting was like the features of the day she set her brush to picture:  characteristic of a season rather than cheerless in tone, though it breathed little cheer.  Is there not a pleasure in contemplating that which is characteristic?  Her unfinished sketch recalled him after he had gone:  he lived in it, to startle her again, and bid her heart gallop and her cheeks burn.  The question occurred to her:  May not one love, not craving to be beloved?  Such a love does not sap our pride, but supports it; increases rather than diminishes our noble self-esteem.  To attain such a love the martyrs writhed up to the crown of saints.  For a while Cecilia revelled in the thought that she could love in this most saint-like manner.  How they fled, the sordid ideas of him which accused him of the world’s one passion, and were transferred to her own bosom in reproach that she should have imagined them existing in his!  He talked simply and sweetly of his defeat, of time wasted away from the canvass, of loss of money:  and he had little to spare, he said.  The water-colour drawing interested him.  He said he envied her that power of isolation, and the eye for beauty in every season.  She opened a portfolio of Mr. Tuckham’s water-colour drawings in every clime; scenes of Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and he was to be excused for not caring to look through them.  His remark, that they seemed hard and dogged, was not so unjust, she thought, smiling to think of the critic criticized.  His wonderment that a young man like his Lancastrian cousin should be ’an unmitigated Tory’ was perhaps natural.