But if Clara deceived him, he inspired her with timidity.  There was matter in that to make him wish to be deceived.  She had not looked him much in the face:  she had not crossed his eyes:  she had looked deliberately downward, keeping her head up, to preserve an exterior pride.  The attitude had its bewitchingness:  the girl’s physical pride of stature scorning to bend under a load of conscious guilt, had a certain black-angel beauty for which he felt a hugging hatred:  and according to his policy when these fits of amorous meditation seized him, he burst from the present one in the mood of his more favourable conception of Clara, and sought her out.

The quality of the mood of hugging hatred is, that if you are disallowed the hug, you do not hate the fiercer.

Contrariwise the prescription of a decorous distance of two feet ten inches, which is by measurement the delimitation exacted of a rightly respectful deportment, has this miraculous effect on the great creature man, or often it has:  that his peculiar hatred returns to the reluctant admiration begetting it, and his passion for the hug falls prostrate as one of the Faithful before the shrine; he is reduced to worship by fasting.

(For these mysteries, consult the sublime chapter in the great book, the Seventy-first on love, wherein nothing is written, but the Reader receives a Lanthorn, a Powder-cask and a Pick-axe, and therewith pursues his yellow-dusking path across the rubble of preceding excavators in the solitary quarry:  a yet more instructive passage than the overscrawled Seventieth, or French Section, whence the chapter opens, and where hitherto the polite world has halted.)

The hurry of the hero is on us, we have no time to spare for mining works:  he hurried to catch her alone, to wreak his tortures on her in a bitter semblance of bodily worship, and satiated, then comfortably to spurn.  He found her protected by Barclay on the stairs.

“That letter for me?” he said.

“I think I told you, Willoughby, there was a letter I left with Barclay to reassure you in case of my not returning early,” said Clara.  “It was unnecessary for her to deliver it.”

“Indeed?  But any letter, any writing of yours, and from you to me!  You have it still?”

“No, I have destroyed it.”

“That was wrong.”

“It could not have given you pleasure.”

“My dear Clara, one line from you!”

“There were but three.”

Barclay stood sucking her lips.  A maid in the secrets of her mistress is a purchaseable maid, for if she will take a bribe with her right hand she will with her left; all that has to be calculated is the nature and amount of the bribe:  such was the speculation indulged by Sir Willoughby, and he shrank from the thought and declined to know more than that he was on a volcanic hillside where a thin crust quaked over lava.  This was a new condition with him, representing Clara’s gain in their combat.  Clara did not fear his questioning so much as he feared her candour.