Dacier was never the best of sleepers.  He had taken to exercise his brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and a reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of the emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than commonly a child of nerves:  nearly as much so as the dissipated, with the difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury, which he is not; and he may recover under favouring conditions, which is a point of vantage denied to them.  Physically he had stout reserves, for he had not disgraced the temple.  His intemperateness lay in the craving to rise and lead:  a precocious ambition.  This apparently modest young man started with an aim—­and if in the distance and with but a slingstone, like the slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his energies were in his aim—­at Government.  He had hung on the fringe of an Administration.  His party was out, and he hoped for higher station on its return to power.  Many perplexities were therefore buzzing about his head; among them at present one sufficiently magnified and voracious to swallow the remainder.  He added force to the interrogation as to why that Bell should sound its inhuman strokes twice, by asking himself why he was there to hear it!  A strange suspicion of a bewitchment might have enlightened him if he had been a man accustomed to yield to the peculiar kind of sorcery issuing from that sex.  He rather despised the power of women over men:  and nevertheless he was there, listening to that Bell, instead of having obeyed the call of his family duties, when the latter were urgent.  He had received letters at Lugano, summoning him home, before he set forth on his present expedition.  The noisy alarum told him he floundered in quags, like a silly creature chasing a marsh-lamp.  But was it so?  Was it not, on the contrary, a serious pursuit of the secret of a woman’s character?—­Oh, a woman and her character!  Ordinary women and their characters might set to work to get what relationship and likeness they could.  They had no secret to allure.  This one had:  she had the secret of lake waters under rock, unfathomable in limpidness.  He could not think of her without shooting at nature, and nature’s very sweetest and subtlest, for comparison.  As to her sex, his active man’s contempt of the petticoated secret attractive to boys and graylings, made him believe that in her he hunted the mind and the spirit:  perchance a double mind, a twilighted spirit; but not a mere woman.  She bore no resemblance to the bundle of women.  Well, she was worth studying; she had ideas, and could give ear to ideas.  Furthermore, a couple of the members of his family inclined to do her injustice.  At least, they judged her harshly, owing, he thought, to an inveterate opinion they held regarding Lord Dannisburgh’s obliquity in relation to women.  He shared it, and did not concur in, their verdict upon the woman implicated.  That is to say, knowing something of her now, he could see the possibility of her innocence in the special charm that her mere sparkle of features and speech, and her freshness would have for a man like his uncle.  The possibility pleaded strongly on her behalf, while the darker possibility weighted by his uncle’s reputation plucked at him from below.