The laboured resistance which Lady Constantine's judgment had offered to

her rebellious affection ere she learnt that she was a widow, now passed

into a bashfulness that rendered her almost as unstable of mood as

before. But she was one of that mettle--fervid, cordial, and

spontaneous--who had not the heart to spoil a passion; and her affairs

having gone to rack and ruin by no fault of her own she was left to a

painfully narrowed existence which lent even something of rationality to

her attachment. Thus it was that her tender and unambitious soul found

comfort in her reverses.

As for St. Cleeve, the tardiness of his awakening was the natural result

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of inexperience combined with devotion to a hobby. But, like a spring

bud hard in bursting, the delay was compensated by after speed. At once

breathlessly recognizing in this fellow-watcher of the skies a woman who

loved him, in addition to the patroness and friend, he truly translated

the nearly forgotten kiss she had given him in her moment of despair.

Lady Constantine, in being eight or nine years his senior, was an object

even better calculated to nourish a youth's first passion than a girl of

his own age, superiority of experience and ripeness of emotion exercising

the same peculiar fascination over him as over other young men in their

first ventures in this kind.

The alchemy which thus transmuted an abstracted astronomer into an eager

lover--and, must it be said, spoilt a promising young physicist to

produce a common-place inamorato--may be almost described as working its

change in one short night. Next morning he was so fascinated with the

novel sensation that he wanted to rush off at once to Lady Constantine,

and say, 'I love you true!' in the intensest tones of his mental

condition, to register his assertion in her heart before any of those

accidents which 'creep in 'twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,'

should occur to hinder him. But his embarrassment at standing in a new

position towards her would not allow him to present himself at her door

in any such hurry. He waited on, as helplessly as a girl, for a chance

of encountering her.

But though she had tacitly agreed to see him on any reasonable occasion,

Lady Constantine did not put herself in his way. She even kept herself

out of his way. Now that for the first time he had learnt to feel a

strong impatience for their meeting, her shyness for the first time led

her to delay it. But given two people living in one parish, who long

from the depths of their hearts to be in each other's company, what

resolves of modesty, policy, pride, or apprehension will keep them for

any length of time apart?




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