‘But what an extraordinary idea!’ cried Moxey.  ’Why Peak is all but a woman-hater!’

The journalist uttered croaking laughter.

‘Have I totally misunderstood him?’ asked Christian, confused and abashed.

‘I think it not impossible.’

’You amaze me!—­But no, no; you are wrong, Earwaker.  Wrong in your suggestion, I mean.  Peak could never sink to that.  He is too uncompromising’——­

‘Well, it will be explained some day, I suppose.’

And with a shrug of impatience, the journalist turned to another subject.  He, too, regretted his old friend’s disappearance, and in a measure resented it.  Godwin Peak was not a man to slip out of one’s life and leave no appreciable vacancy.  Neither of these men admired him, in the true sense of the word, yet had his voice sounded at the door both would have sprung up with eager welcome.  He was a force—­ and how many such beings does one encounter in a lifetime?

CHAPTER II

In different ways, Christian and Marcella Moxey had both been lonely since their childhood.  As a schoolgirl, Marcella seemed to her companions conceited and repellent; only as the result of reflection in after years did Sylvia Moorhouse express so favourable an opinion of her.  In all things she affected singularity; especially it was her delight to utter democratic and revolutionary sentiments among hearers who, belonging to a rigidly conservative order, held such opinions impious.  Arrived at womanhood, she affected scorn of the beliefs and habits cherished by her own sex, and shrank from association with the other.  Godwin Peak was the first man with whom she conversed in the tone of friendship, and it took a year or more before that point was reached.  As her intimacy with him established itself, she was observed to undergo changes which seemed very significant in the eyes of her few acquaintances.  Disregard of costume had been one of her characteristics, but now she moved gradually towards the opposite extreme, till her dresses were occasionally more noticeable for richness than for good taste.

Christian, for kindred reasons, was equally debarred from the pleasures and profits of society.  At school, his teachers considered him clever, his fellows for the most part looked down upon him as a sentimental weakling.  The death of his parents, when he was still a lad, left him to the indifferent care of a guardian nothing akin to him.  He began life in an uncongenial position, and had not courage to oppose the drift of circumstances.  The romantic attachment which absorbed his best years naturally had a debilitating effect, for love was never yet a supporter of the strenuous virtues, save when it has survived fruition and been blessed by reason.  In most men a fit of amorous mooning works its own cure; energetic rebound is soon inevitable.  But Christian was so constituted that a decade of years could not exhaust his capacity