Then he would look up at the castle stonily, in a mood of desperate renunciation, and vaguely meditate packing his belongings, and going home to England.

At other moments a third answer would seem the plain one:  something between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a compromise, it not a reconciliation.

“Come!  Let us be calm, let us be judicial.  The consequences of our actions, here below, if hardly ever so good as we could hope, are hardly ever so bad as we might fear.  Let us regard this matter in the light of that guiding principle.  True, she does n’t dream that you are Wildmay.  True, if you were abruptly to say to her, ‘I am Wildmay—­you are the woman,’ she would be astonished—­even, if you will, at first, more or less taken aback, disconcerted.  But indignant?  Why?  What is this gulf that separates you from her?  What are these conventional barriers of which you make so much?  She is a duchess, she is the daughter of a lord, and she is rich.  Well, all that is to be regretted.  But you are neither a plebeian nor a pauper yourself.  You are a man of good birth, you are a man of some parts, and you have a decent income.  It amounts to this—­she is a great lady, you are a small gentleman.  In ordinary circumstances, to be sure, so small a gentleman could not ask so great a lady to become his wife.  But here the circumstances are not ordinary.  Destiny has meddled in the business.  Small gentleman though you are, an unusual and subtle relation-ship has been established between you and your great lady.  She herself says, ’Ordinary rules cannot apply—­he ought to tell her.’  Very good:  tell her.  She will be astonished, but she will see that there is no occasion for resentment.  And though the odds are, of course, a hundred to one that she will not accept you, still she must treat you as an honourable suitor.  And whether she accepts you or rejects you, it is better to tell her and to have it over, than to go on forever dangling this way, like the poor cat in the adage.  Tell her—­put your fate to the touch—­hope nothing, fear nothing—­and bow to the event.”

But even this temperate answer provoked its counter-answer.

“The odds are a hundred to one, a thousand to one, that she will not accept you.  And if you tell her, and she does not accept you, she will not allow you to see her any more, you will be exiled from her presence.  And I thought, you did not wish to be exiled from her presence, You would stake, then, this great privilege, the privilege of seeing her, of knowing her, upon a. chance that has a thousand to one against it.  You make light of the conventional barriers—­but the principal barrier of them all, you are forgetting.  She is a Roman Catholic, and a devout one.  Marry a Protestant?  She would as soon think of marrying a Paynim Turk.”

In the end, no doubt, a kind of exhaustion followed upon his excitement.  Questions and answers suspended themselves; and he could only look up towards Ventirose, and dumbly wish that he was there.  The distance was so trifling—­in five minutes he could traverse it—­the law seemed absurd and arbitrary, which condemned him to sit apart, free only to look and wish.