casting himself away upon the first creature with a pretty face he encountered?” Deliberating thus, he lost the tenderness he should have had for his experiment—­the living, burning youth at his elbow, and his excessive love for him took a rigorous tone.  It appeared to him politic, reasonable, and just, that the uncle of this young woman, who had so long nursed the prudent scheme of marrying her to his son, should not only not be thwarted in his object but encouraged and even assisted.  At least, not thwarted.  Sir Austin had no glass before him while these ideas hardened in his mind, and he had rather forgotten the letter of Lady Blandish.

Father and son were alone in the railway carriage.  Both were too preoccupied to speak.  As they neared Bellingham the dark was filling the hollows of the country.  Over the pine-hills beyond the station a last rosy streak lingered across a green sky.  Richard eyed it while they flew along.  It caught him forward:  it seemed full of the spirit of his love, and brought tears of mournful longing to his eyelids.  The sad beauty of that one spot in the heavens seemed to call out to his soul to swear to his Lucy’s truth to him:  was like the sorrowful visage of his fleur-de-luce as he called her, appealing to him for faith.  That tremulous tender way she had of half-closing and catching light on the nether-lids, when sometimes she looked up in her lover’s face—­as look so mystic-sweet that it had grown to be the fountain of his dreams:  he saw it yonder, and his blood thrilled.

Know you those wand-like touches of I know not what, before which our grosser being melts; and we, much as we hope to be in the Awaking, stand etherealized, trembling with new joy?  They come but rarely; rarely even in love, when we fondly think them revelations.  Mere sensations they are, doubtless:  and we rank for them no higher in the spiritual scale than so many translucent glorious polypi that quiver on the shores, the hues of heaven running through them.  Yet in the harvest of our days it is something for the animal to have had such mere fleshly polypian experiences to look back upon, and they give him an horizon—­pale seas of luring splendour.  One who has had them (when they do not bound him) may find the Isles of Bliss sooner than another.  Sensual faith in the upper glories is something.  “Let us remember,” says The Pilgrim’s Scrip, “that Nature, though heathenish, reaches at her best to the footstool of the Highest.  She is not all dust, but a living portion of the spheres.  In aspiration it is our error to despise her, forgetting that through Nature only can we ascend.  Cherished, trained, and purified, she is then partly worthy the divine mate who is to make her wholly so.  St. Simeon saw the Hog in Nature, and took Nature for the Hog.”

It was one of these strange bodily exaltations which thrilled the young man, he knew not how it was, for sadness and his forebodings vanished.  The soft wand touched him.  At that moment, had Sir Austin spoken openly, Richard might have fallen upon his heart.  He could not.