Also that she was only a brilliant bird of passage, who, in a few months, would be caught in the dazzling net of the great world.  And that even Lord Westholt and Dunholm Castle were not quite what she might expect.  Lady Mary was sincerely interested.  She drove it home in her ardour.  She told me to look at her—­to look at her mouth and chin and eyelashes—­and to make note of what she stood for in a crowd of ordinary people.  I could have laughed aloud with rage and self-mockery.”

Mr. Penzance was resting his forehead on his hand, his elbow on his chair’s arm.

“This is profound unhappiness,” he said.  “It is profound unhappiness.”

Mount Dunstan answered by a brusque gesture.

“But it will pass away,” went on Penzance, “and not as you fear it must,” in answer to another gesture, fiercely impatient.  “Not that way.  Some day—­or night—­you will stand here together, and you will tell her all you have told me.  I know it will be so.”

“What!” Mount Dunstan cried out.  But the words had been spoken with such absolute conviction that he felt himself become pale.

It was with the same conviction that Penzance went on.

“I have spent my quiet life in thinking of the forces for which we find no explanation—­of the causes of which we only see the effects.  Long ago in looking at you in one of my pondering moments I said to myself that you were of the Primeval Force which cannot lose its way—­which sweeps a clear pathway for itself as it moves—­and which cannot be held back.  I said to you just now that because you are a strong man you cannot be sure that a woman you are—­even in spite of yourself—­making mad love to, is unconscious that you are doing it.  You do not know what your strength lies in.  I do not, the woman does not, but we must all feel it, whether we comprehend it or no.  You said of this fine creature, some time since, that she was Life, and you have just said again something of the same kind.  It is quite true.  She is Life, and the joy of it.  You are two strong forces, and you are drawing together.”

He rose from his chair, and going to Mount Dunstan put his hand on his shoulder, his fine old face singularly rapt and glowing.

“She is drawing you and you are drawing her, and each is too strong to release the other.  I believe that to be true.  Both bodies and souls do it.  They are not separate things.  They move on their way as the stars do—­they move on their way.”

As he spoke, Mount Dunstan’s eyes looked into his fixedly.  Then they turned aside and looked down upon the mantel against which he was leaning.  He aimlessly picked up his pipe and laid it down again.  He was paler than before, but he said no single word.

“You think your reasons for holding aloof from her are the reasons of a man.”  Mr. Penzance’s voice sounded to him remote.  “They are the reasons of a man’s pride—­but that is not the strongest thing in the world.  It only imagines it is.  You think that you cannot go to her as a luckier man could.  You think nothing shall force you to speak.  Ask yourself why.  It is because you believe that to show your heart would be to place yourself in the humiliating position of a man who might seem to her and to the world to be a base fellow.”