He often thought of telling the whole story to his aunt; but like many people who seem extraordinarily frank about their feelings and fancies, and speak easily even of their emotions, he found himself condemned to silence about any emotion or experience that had any serious or tragic quality.  Most people would have thought him communicative, and even lacking in reticence.  But he knew in himself that it was not so; he could speak of his intimate ideas very readily upon slight acquaintance, because they were not to him matters of deep feeling; but the moment that they really moved him, he felt absolutely dumb and tongue-tied.

He established himself at Windlow, and became at once aware that his aunt perceived that there was something amiss.  She gave him opportunities of speaking to her, but he could not take them.  He shrank with a painful dumbness from displaying his secret wound.  It seemed to him undignified and humiliating to confess his weakness.  He hoped vaguely that the situation would solve itself, and spare him the necessity of a confession.

He tried to occupy himself in his book, but in vain.  Now that he was confronted with a real and urgent dilemma, the origins of religion seemed to him to have no meaning or interest.  He did not feel that they had any bearing whatever upon life; and his pain seemed to infect all his perceptions.  The quality of beauty in common things, the hill-shapes, the colour of field and wood, the lights of dawn and eve, the sailing cloud, the tints of weathered stone, the old house in its embowered garden, with the pure green lines of the down above, had no charm or significance for him any more.  Again and again he said to himself, “How beautiful that would be, if I could but feel it to be so!” He saw, as clearly and critically as ever, the pleasant forms and hues and groupings of things, but it was dull and savourless, while all the attractive ideas that sprang up like flowers in his mind, the happy trains of thought, in which some single fancy ramified and extended itself into unsuspected combinations and connections, these all seemed hardly worth recognising or pursuing.  He found himself listless and distracted, just able by an effort to talk, to listen, to exchange thoughts, but utterly without any zest or energy.

Jack had gone off for a short visit, and Howard was thus left mostly alone.  He went once or twice to the Vicarage, but found Mr. Sandys an unmixed trial; there seemed something wholly puerile about his absurd energies and activities.  The only boon of his society was that he expected no reply to his soliloquies.  Maud was there too, a distant graceful figure; but she, too, seemed to have withdrawn into her own thoughts, and their talk was mostly formal.  Yet he was painfully and acutely conscious of her presence.  She, too, seemed to be clouded and sad.  He found himself unable to talk to her unconstrainedly.  He could only dumbly watch her; she appeared to avert