candles.  Hence her circles about the dangerous human flame are wide and shy.  She must be drawn nearer and nearer by a fresh reason.  She loves to sentimentalize.  Lady Blandish had been sentimentalizing for ten years.  She would have preferred to pursue the game.  The dark-eyed dame was pleased with her smooth life and the soft excitement that did not ruffle it.  Not willingly did she let herself be won.

“Sentimentalists,” says The Pilgrim’s Scrip, “are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done.”

“It is,” the writer says of Sentimentalism elsewhere, “a happy pastime and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but a damning one to them who have anything to forfeit.”

However, one who could set down the dying for love, as a sentimentalism, can hardly be accepted as a clear authority.  Assuredly he was not one to avoid the incurring of the immense debtorship in any way:  but he was a bondsman still to the woman who had forsaken him, and a spoken word would have made it seem his duty to face that public scandal which was the last evil to him.  What had so horrified the virtuous Benson, Richard had already beheld in Daphne’s Bower; a simple kissing of the fair white hand!  Doubtless the keyhole somehow added to Benson’s horror.  The two similar performances, so very innocent, had wondrous opposite consequences.  The first kindled Richard to adore Woman; the second destroyed Benson’s faith in Man.  But Lady Blandish knew the difference between the two.  She understood why the baronet did not speak; excused, and respected him for it.  She was content, since she must love, to love humbly, and she had, besides, her pity for his sorrows to comfort her.  A hundred fresh reasons for loving him arose and multiplied every day.  He read to her the secret book in his own handwriting, composed for Richard’s Marriage Guide:  containing Advice and Directions to a Young Husband, full of the most tender wisdom and delicacy; so she thought; nay, not wanting in poetry, though neither rhymed nor measured.  He expounded to her the distinctive character of the divers ages of love, giving the palm to the flower she put forth, over that of Spring, or the Summer rose.  And while they sat and talked; “My wound has healed,” he said.  “How?” she asked.  “At the fountain of your eyes,” he replied, and drew the joy of new life from her blushes, without incurring further debtor ship for a thing done.

CHAPTER XXV

Let it be some apology for the damage caused by the careering hero, and a consolation to the quiet wretches, dragged along with him at his chariot-wheels, that he is generally the last to know when he has made an actual start; such a mere creature is he, like the rest of us, albeit the head of our fates.  By this you perceive the true hero, whether he be a prince or a pot-boy, that he does not plot; Fortune does all for him.  He may be compared to one to whom, in an electric circle, it is given to carry the battery.