The next day I remember I borrowed Henry’s horse, and rode madly about, bounding through woods (I who had long forgotten to ride) and galloping over open downs.  If the animal had not been wiser and more sane than I was, we should have been dashed to pieces many times.  And so by sheer exhaustion of body I deadened the misery of my mind, and looked upon their happy state with a kind of stupefaction.  In a few days I found a pretext for quitting my home, and I never saw your mother again, for it was your mother, Mildred, and you are not like her, but like your father, and still I love you.  But the great wound has never been healed.  It is a foolish thing, perhaps, that any man should so doat upon a woman, that he should never afterwards care for any other, but so it has been with me; and you cannot wonder that a sort of terror should come over me when I see anybody in love, and when I think that his or her love is not likely to be returned.

Who would have thought that Dunsford, with his gaiters, lying on the grass listening cheerfully to the lively talk of his two friends, or sitting among his bees repeating Virgil to himself, or going about among his parishioners, the ideal of prosaic content and usefulness, had still in him this store of old romance?  In asking the question, all we mean is to remark an apparent inconsistency:  we have no doubt at all of the philosophic truth of the representation.  Probably it is only in the finer natures that such early fancies linger with appreciable effect.  We do not forget the perpetually repeated declarations of Mr. Thackeray; we did not read Mr. Gilfits Love Story for nothing; we remember the very absurd incident which is told of Dr. Chalmers, who in his last years testified his remembrance of an early sweet-heart by sticking his card with two wafers behind a wretched little silhouette of her.  And it is conceivable that the tenderest and most beautiful reminiscences of a love of departed days may linger with a man who has grown grey, fat, and even snuffy.  But it is only in the case of remarkably tidy, neat, and clever old gentlemen that such feelings are likely to attract much sympathy from their juniors.  Possibly this world has more of such lingering romance than is generally credited.  Possibly with all but very stolid and narrow natures, no very strong feeling goes without leaving some trace.

        Pain and grief
    Are transitory things no less than joy;
    And though they leave us not the men we were,
    Yet they do leave us.

Possibly it is not without some little stir of heart that most thoughtful aged persons can revisit certain spots, or see certain days return.  And the affection which would have worn itself down into dull common-place in success, by being disappointed and frustrated, lives on in memory with diminished vividness but with increasing beauty, which the test of actual fact can never make prosaic.  Dunsford tells Mildred what was his great inducement to make this continental tour.  Not the Rhine; not the essays nor the conversations of his friends.  At the Palace of the Luxemburg there is a fine picture, called Les illusions perdues.  It is one of the most affecting pictures Dunsford ever saw.  But that is not its peculiar merit.  One girl in the picture is the image of what Alice was.