Journeying down by the mail-train in the face of a great sunken sunset broken with cloud, I chanced to ask myself what it was that I seriously desired to have.  My purpose to curb my father was sincere and good; but concerning my heart’s desires, whitherward did they point?  I thought of Janet—­she made me gasp for air; of Ottilia, and she made me long for earth.  Sharp, as I write it, the distinction smote me.  I might have been divided by an electrical shot into two halves, with such an equal force was I drawn this way and that, pointing nowhither.  To strangle the thought of either one of them was like the pang of death; yet it did not strike me that I loved the two:  they were apart in my mind, actually as if I had been divided.  I passed the Riversley station under sombre sunset fires, saddened by the fancy that my old home and vivacious Janet were ashes, past hope.  I came on the smell of salt air, and had that other spirit of woman around me, of whom the controlled seadeeps were an image, who spoke to my soul like starlight.  Much wise counsel, and impatience of the wisdom, went on within me.  I walked like a man with a yawning wound, and had to whip the sense of passion for a drug.  Toward which one it strove I know not; it was blind and stormy as the night.

Not a boatman would take me across.  The lights of the island lay like a crown on the water.  I paced the ramparts, eyeing them, breathing the keen salt of thundering waves, until they were robbed of their magic by the coloured Fast.

It is, I have learnt, out of the conflict of sensations such as I then underwent that a young man’s brain and morality, supposing him not to lean overmuch to sickly sentiment, becomes gradually enriched and strengthened, and himself shaped for capable manhood.  I was partly conscious of a better condition in the morning; and a sober morning it was to me after my long sentinel’s step to and fro.  I found myself possessed of one key—­whether the right one or not—­wherewith to read the princess, which was never possible to me when I was under stress of passion, or of hope or despair; my perplexities over what she said, how she looked, ceased to trouble me.  I read her by this strange light:  that she was a woman who could only love intelligently—­love, that is, in the sense of giving herself.  She had the power of passion, and it could be stirred; but he who kindled it wrecked his chance if he could not stand clear in her intellect’s unsparing gaze.  Twice already she must have felt herself disillusioned by me.  This third time, possibly, she blamed her own fatally credulous tenderness, not me; but it was her third awakening, and could affection and warmth of heart combat it?  Her child’s enthusiasm for my country had prepared her for the impression which the waxen mind of the dreamy invalid received deeply; and so, aided by the emotional blood of youth, she gave me place in her imagination, probing me still curiously, as I remembered, at a season when her sedate mind was attaining to joint deliberations with the impulsive overgenerous heart.