But could he be imagined seeking to put her on her guard?  There may be modesty in men well aware of their personal attractions:  they can credit individual women with powers of resistance.  He was not vain to the degree which stupefies the sense of there being weight or wisdom in others.  And he was honour’s own.  By these lights of his character she read the act.  His intention was . . . and even while she saw it accurately, the moment of keen perception was overclouded by her innate distrust of her claim to feminine charms.  For why should he wish her to understand that he was no fortune-hunter and treated heiresses with greater reserve than ordinary women!  How could it matter to him?

She saw the tears roll.  Tears of men sink plummet-deep; they find their level.  The tears of such a man have more of blood than of water in them.—­What was she doing when they fell?  She was shading his head from the sun.  What, then, if those tears came of the repressed desire to thank her with some little warmth?  He was honour’s own, and warmhearted Patrick talked of him as a friend whose heart was, his friend’s.  Thrilling to kindness, and, poor soul! helpless to escape it, he felt perhaps that he had never thanked her, and could not.  He lay there, weak and tongue-tied:  hence those two bright volumes of his condition of weakness.

So the pursuit of the mystery ended, as it had commenced, in confusion, but of a milder sort and partially transparent at one or two of the gates she had touched.  A mind capable of seeing was twisted by a nature that would not allow of open eyes; yet the laden emotions of her nature brought her round by another channel to the stage neighbouring sight, where facts, dimly recognised for such—­as they may be in truth, are accepted under their disguises, because disguise of them is needed by the bashful spirit which accuses itself of audaciousness in presuming to speculate.  Had she asked herself the reason of her extended speculation, her foot would not have stopped more abruptly on the edge of a torrent than she on that strange road of vapours and flying lights.  She did not; she sang, she sent her voice through the woods and took the splendid ring of it for an assurance of her peculiarly unshackled state.  She loved this liberty.  Of the men who had ‘done her the honour,’ not one had moved her to regret the refusal.  She lived in the hope of simply doing good, and could only give her hand to a man able to direct and help her; one who would bear to be matched with her brother.  Who was he?  Not discoverable; not likely to be.

Therefore she had her freedom, an absolutely unflushed freedom, happier than poor Grace Barrow’s.  Rumour spoke of Emma Colesworth having a wing clipped.  How is it that sensible women can be so susceptible?  For, thought Jane, the moment a woman is what is called in love, she can give her heart no longer to the innocent things about her; she is cut away from Nature:  that pure well-water is tasteless to her.  To me it is wine!