George did not forget Mamie’s strange behaviour in the boat, and he devoted much time to the study of the problem it presented. To judge from the girl’s conduct alone, she must be in love with him, and yet he did not like the idea and took the greatest pains to keep it out of his mind. He was not in the humour in which it is a pleasant surprise to a man to discover unexpected affection for himself in a quarter where he has not expected to find it. Moreover, if he had once made sure that Mamie loved him, he would probably have thought it his duty to go away as quickly as possible. Such a decision would have deprived him of much that he enjoyed and it was desirable in the interests of his selfishness that it should be put off as long as possible.

At that time George began to feel the desire for work creeping upon him once more. During a few weeks only had it been in his power to put away the habit of writing, and to close his eyes to all responsibility. Those had been days when the whole world had seemed to be upside down, as in a dream, while he himself moved in the midst of a disordered creation, uncertainty, like a soulless creature, without the capacity for independent action nor the intelligence to form any distinct intention from one moment to another. He took what he found in his way without understanding, though not without an odd appreciation of what was good, very much as Eastern princes receive European hospitality. He was grateful at least that his life should be made so smooth for the time, for he was dimly conscious that anything outwardly rough or coarse would have exasperated him to madness. He believed that he thought a great deal about the past, but when he attempted to give his meditations a shape, they would accept none. In reality he was not thinking, though the mirror of his memory was filled with fleeting reflections of his former life, some clear and startlingly vivid, others distorted and broken, but all more or less beautified by the shadowy presence of a being he had loved better than himself, and from whom he was separated for ever.

With such a man, however, idleness was as impossible as the desire for expression was irresistible. Since he had written his first book, and had discovered what it was that he was born to do, he had taken up a burden which he could not lay down and had sworn allegiance to a master from whom he could not escape. Not even the bitter and overwhelming disappointment that had come upon him could kill the desire to write. He was almost ashamed of it at first, for he felt that though everything he loved best in the world were dead before him, he should be driven within a few weeks to take up his pen again and open his inner eyes and ears to the play of his mind’s stage.

The power to do certain things is rarely separated from the necessity for doing them, and the fact that they are well done by no means proves that the doer has forgotten the blow that recently overwhelmed his heart in darkness and his daily life in an almost uncontrollable grief. There are two lives for most men, whatever their careers may be, and the absence of either of these lives makes a man produce an impression of incompleteness upon those who know him. When any one lives only by the existence of the heart, without active occupation, without manifesting inclination, taste or talent for outward things, we say that he has no interest in life, and is much to be pitied. But we say that a man is heartless and selfish who appears to devote every thought to his occupation and every moment to increasing the chances of his success. In the lives of great men we search with an especial pleasure for all that can show us the working of their hearts, and we remember with delight whatever we find that indicates a separate and inner chain of events, of which the links have been loves and friendships kept secret from the world. The more nearly the two lives have coincided, the more happy we judge the man to have been, the more out of tune and discordant with each other, the more we feel that his existence must have seemed a failure in his own eyes; and when we are told only of his doings before the world, without one touch of softer feeling, we lay aside the book of his biography and say that it is badly written and that we are surprised to find that a man so uninteresting in himself should have exercised so much influence over his times.

George Wood had neither forgotten Constance, nor had he recovered from the wound he had received, and yet within a day or two of his resuming his work, he found that his love of it was not diminished nor his strength to do it abated. It was not happiness to write, but it was satisfaction. His hesitation was gone now, and his hand had recovered its cunning. He no longer sat for hours before a blank sheet of paper, staring at the wall and racking his brain in the hope that a character of some sort would suddenly start into shape and life from the chaotic darkness he was facing. Until the first difficulties that attend the beginning of a book were overcome, he had still a lingering and unacknowledged suspicion that he could do nothing good without the daily criticism and unfailing applause he had been accustomed to receive from Constance during his former efforts. When he was fairly launched, he felt proud of being able to do without her. For the first time he was depending solely upon his own judgment, as he had always relied upon his own ideas, and his judgment decided that what he did was good.

From that time the arrangement of his day took again the definite shape in which he had always known it, and the mere distribution of his hours between work and rest gave him back confidence in himself. He began to see his surroundings from a more intelligent point of view, and to take a keener interest in things and people. Though he had by no means recovered from the first great shock of his life, and though in his heart he was as bitter as ever against her who had inflicted it, yet his mind was already convalescent and was being rapidly restored to its former vigour. There was power in his imagination, strength in his language and harmony in his style. What he thought took shape, and the shape found expression.

He soon found that under these circumstances life was bearable, and often enjoyable. Very gradually, as his concentrated attention became absorbed in his own creations, the face of Constance Fearing appeared less often in his dreams, and the heartbroken tones of her voice rang less continually in his ears. He was not forgetting, but the physical impressions of sight and sound upon his senses were wearing off. Occasionally indeed they would return with startling force and vividness, awakening in him for one moment the reality of all he had suffered. At such times he could see again, as though face to face, her expression at the instant when she had seemed to relinquish the attempt to soften him, and he could hear again the plaintive accents of her words and the painful cadence of her sobbing voice. But such visitations grew daily more rare and at last almost ceased altogether.

For what he had done himself he felt no remorse. His mind was not made like hers, and he would never be able to understand that she had done violence to her own heart in casting him off. He would learn perhaps some day to describe what she had done, to analyse her motives from his own point of view, but he would never be able to think of her as she thought of herself. In his eyes she would always be a little contemptible, even when time’s charitable mists should have descended upon the past and softened all its outlines. He was cut off from her by one of the most impassable barriers which can be raised in the human heart, by his resentment against himself for having been deceived.

He did not ask himself whether he could ever love again. There was a strength in his present position, which almost pleased him. He had done with love and was free to speak of it as he chose, without regard for any one’s feelings, without respect for the passion itself, if it suited his humour. There had been nothing boyish in the pure and passionate affection under which he had lived during two of the most important years in his life. He had felt all that a man can feel in the deep devotion to one spotless object. There would never again be anything so high and noble and untainted in all the years that were to come for him, and he knew it. The determination he had felt to be necessary in the first moment of his anger had carried itself out almost without any direction from his will. The Constance he had loved so dearly, was not the Constance who had refused to marry him, and who had dealt him such a cruel blow. The two were separated and he could still love the one, while hating and despising the other. But although he might meet the girl whose face and form and look and voice were those of her he had lost, this second Constance could never take the other’s place. A word from her could not put fire into his heart, nor raise in his brain the vision of a magnificent inspiration. A touch from her hand could send no thrill of pleasure through his frame, there would be no joy in looking upon her fair face when next he saw it. She might say to him all that he had once said to her, she might appeal passionately to the love that was now dead, she might offer him her heart, her body and her soul. He wanted none of the three now. The break had been final and definite, love’s path had broken off upon the edge of the precipice, and though she might stand on the old familiar way and beckon to him to come over and meet her, there was that between them which no man could cross.

Like all great passions the one through which George Wood had passed had produced upon him a definite effect, which could be appreciated, if not accurately measured. He was older in every way now than he had been two years and a half earlier, but older chiefly in his understanding of human nature. He knew, now, what men and women felt in certain circumstances, his instinct told him truly what it had formerly only vaguely suggested. The inevitable logic of life had taken him up as a problem, had dealt with him as with a subject fitted to its hand, and had forced upon him a solution of himself. Where he had entertained doubts, he now felt certainty, where he had hesitated in expressing the judgment of his tastes he now found his verdicts already considered and only awaiting delivery. Many months later, when the book he was now writing was published it was a new surprise to his readers. His first attempts had been noticeable for their beauty, his last book was remarkable for its truth.

Meanwhile his intimacy with Mamie grew unheeded by himself. During the many hours of each day in which he had no fixed occupation, he was almost constantly with her, and their conversation was at last only interrupted each evening to begin again the next afternoon, when he had done his work and came out of his room in search of relaxation. He had never found any explanation for her embarrassment on that day when he had been rowing her about on the river, and after a time he had ceased to seek for one. His brain was too busy with other things, and what he wanted when he was with her was rest rather than exercise for his curiosity in trying to solve the small enigmas of her girlish thoughts. She was a very pleasant companion, and that was all he cared to know. She brought about him an atmosphere of genuine and affectionate admiration that gave him confidence in himself and smoothed the furrows of his imagination when he had been giving that faculty more to do than was good for it.

Mamie, too, was happier than she had been a month earlier. She had no longer to suffer the humiliation of taking her mother’s advice about what she should do, and she could enjoy George’s company without feeling that she had been told to enjoy it in her own interest. As she learned to love him more and more, she was quick also to understand his ways. Signs that had formerly escaped her altogether were now as clear to her comprehension as words themselves. She knew, now, almost before he knew it himself, whether he wanted her to join him, or not, whether he preferred to talk or to be silent, whether he would like this question or that which she thought of asking him, or whether he would resent it and make her feel that she had made a mistake. One day, she ventured to mention Constance’s name.

George had never visited the Fearings in their country-place, and was not aware until he came to stay with his cousin that they lived on the opposite shore of the river. Their house was not visible from the Trimms’ side, as it was surrounded by trees, and the stream was at that point nearly two miles in width. Totty, however, who always had a view to avoiding any possibility of anything disagreeable, had very soon communicated the information to George in an unconcerned way, while pointing out and naming to him the various country-seats that could be seen from her part of the shore. George did not forget what he had been told, and if he ever crossed the river and rowed along the other bank, he was careful to keep away from the Fearings’ land, in order to guard against any unpleasant meetings.

Now it chanced that on a certain afternoon he was pulling leisurely up stream towards a place where the current was slack, and where he occasionally moored the wherry to an old landing in order to rest himself and talk more at his ease. Mamie of course was seated in the stern, leaning back comfortably amongst her cushions and holding the tiller-ropes daintily between the thumb and finger of each hand. She could steer very well when it was necessary, and she could even row well enough to make some headway against the stream, but George had been accustomed to being alone in a boat, and gave her very little to do when he was rowing.

Mamie watched him idly, as his hands shot out towards her, crossed as he drew them steadily back and turned at the wrist to feather the oar as they touched his chest. Then her gaze wandered down stream towards the other shore, and she tried to make out the roof of the Fearings’ house above the trees.

“George,” she said suddenly, “will you be angry?”

“I am never angry,” answered her cousin. “What are you going to do now? If you mean to jump out of the boat I will have a line ready.”

“No. I am not going to jump out of the boat. But I am so afraid you will be angry, after all. It is something I want to ask you. I am sure you will not like it!”

“One way of not making me angry would be not to ask the question,” observed George, with a quiet smile.

“But I want to ask you so much!” exclaimed the young girl, with an imploring look that made George’s smile turn into a laugh. He had laughed more than once lately, in a very natural manner.

“Out with it, Mamie!” he cried, pulling his sculls briskly through the water. “I shall not be very angry, I daresay, and I have fallen out of the habit of eating little girls. What is it?”

“Why do you never go and see the Fearings, George? You used to be there so much.”

George’s expression changed, though he continued to row with the same even stroke. His face grew very grave and he unconsciously glanced across the river toward the place at which Mamie had looked.

“I knew you would be angry!” she said in a repentant tone.

“No,” George answered, “I am not angry. I am thinking.”

He was, indeed, wondering how much of the truth the girl knew, and he was distrustful enough to fancy that she might have some object in putting the question. But Mamie was not diplomatic like her mother. She was simple and natural in her thoughts, and unaffected in her manner. He glanced at her again and saw that she was troubled by her indiscretion.

“Did your mother never tell you anything about it all?” he asked after a long pause.

“No. I only heard what everybody heard—last May, when the thing was talked about. I wondered—that is all—I wondered whether you had cared very much—for her.”

Again there was a long silence, broken only by the even dipping of the oars and the soft swirl as they left the water.

“I did care,” George answered at last. “I loved her very dearly.”

He did not know why he made the confession. He had never said so much to any one except his own father. If he had guessed what Mamie felt for him, he would assuredly not have answered her question.

“Are you very unhappy, still?” asked the young girl in a dreamy voice.

“No. I do not think I am unhappy. I am different from what I was—that is all. I was at first,” he continued, without looking at his companion, of whose presence, indeed, he seemed scarcely conscious. “I was unhappy—yes, of course I was. I had loved her long. I had thought she would marry me. I found that she was indifferent. I shall never go and see her again. She does not exist for me any more—she is another person, whom I do not wish to know. I have loved and been disappointed, like many a better man, I suppose.”

“Loved and been disappointed!” repeated the young girl in a very low voice, that hardly reached his ear. She was looking down, carelessly tying and untying the ends of the tiller-ropes.

“Yes. That is it,” he said as though musing on something very long past. “You know now why I do not go there.”

Then he quickened his stroke a little, and there was a sombre light in his dark eyes that Mamie could not see, for she was still looking down. She was glad that she had asked the question, seeing how he had answered it. There was something in his tone which told her that he was not mistaken about himself, and that the past was shut off from the present in his heart by a barrier it would be hard to break down.

“Do you think you can ever love again?” she asked, after a while, looking suddenly into his face.

“No,” he answered, avoiding her eyes. “I shall never love any woman again—in the same way,” he added after a moment’s pause.

When he looked at her, she was very pale. He remembered all at once how she had changed colour and burst into tears some weeks earlier, sitting in that same place before him. Something was passing in her mind which he could not understand. He was very slow to imagine that she loved him. He was so dull of comprehension that he all at once began to fancy she might be more fond of Constance Fearing than he had guessed, that she might be her friend, as Totty was, and that the two had brought him to their country-house in the hope of soothing his anger, reviving his hopes, and bringing him once more into close relations with the young girl who had cast him off. The idea was ingenious in its folly, but his ready wrath rose at it.

“Are you very fond of her, Mamie?” he asked, bending his heavy brows and speaking in a hard metallic voice.

The blood rushed into the girl’s face as she answered, and her grey eyes flashed.

“I? I hate her! I would kill her if I could!”

George was completely confused. His explanation of Mamie’s behaviour had flashed upon him so suddenly that he had believed it the true one without an attempt to reason upon the matter. Now, it was destroyed in an instant by the girl’s angry reply. When one young woman says that she hates another, it is tolerably easy to judge from her tone whether she is in earnest or not. Though he was still sorely puzzled, the cloud disappeared from George’s face as quickly as it had come.

“This is a revelation!” he exclaimed. “I thought you and your mother were devoted to them both.”

“It would be like me, would it not?” Mamie emphasised her words with an angry little laugh.

“It is not like you to hate people so savagely,” George observed, looking at her closely.

“I should always hate anybody who hurt you—and I can hate, with all my heart!”

“Are you so fond of me as that?”

George thought that the girl was becoming every moment harder to understand. It had seemed a very natural question, since they had known each other and loved each other like brother and sister for so long. But he saw that there was something the matter. There was a frightened look in Mamie’s grey eyes which he had never seen before, as though she had come all at once upon a great and unexpected danger. Then all the outline of her face softened wonderfully with a strange and gentle expression under the young man’s gaze. She had never been pretty, save for her eyes and her alabaster skin. For one moment, now, she was beautiful.

“Yes,” she said in an uncertain voice, “I am very fond of you—more fond of you than you will ever know.”

Her secret was out, though she did not realise it. Then for the first time in George’s life, though he was nearly thirty years of age, he looked on the face of a woman who loved him with all her heart, and he knew what love meant in another, as he had known it in himself.

The sun was going down behind the western hills and the dark water was very smooth and placid as he dipped his sculls noiselessly into the surface. He rowed evenly on for some minutes without speaking. Mamie was looking into the stream and drawing her white, ungloved hand along the glassy mirror.

“Thank you, Mamie,” he said at last, very gently and kindly.

Again there was silence as they shot along through the purple shadows.

“And you, are you fond of me?” asked the young girl, looking furtively towards him, then blushing and gazing once more into the depths of the stream. George started slightly. He had not thought that the question would come.

“Indeed I am,” he answered. He thought he heard a sigh on the rising evening breeze. “I grow more fond of you every day,” he added quietly, though he felt that he was very far from calm.

So far as he had spoken, his words had been truthful. He was becoming more attached to Mamie every day, and she was beginning to take the place that Constance had occupied in his doings if not in his thoughts. But there was not a spark of love in his growing affection for her, and the discovery he had just made disturbed him exceedingly. He had never blamed himself for anything he had done in his intercourse with Constance Fearing, but he accused himself now of having misled the innocent girl who loved him and of having then, by a careless question, drawn from her a confession of what she felt. It flashed upon him suddenly that he had taken Constance’s place, and Mamie had taken his; that he had been thoughtless and cruel in all he had said and done during the last two months, and that she might well reproach him with having been heartless. A thousand incidents flooded his memory and crowded together upon his brain, and each brought with it a sting to his sense of honour. He had inadvertently done a great harm, and it had been done since his coming to the country. Before that, Mamie had felt for him exactly what he still felt for her, a simple, open-hearted affection. Remembering the brief struggle that had taken place in his mind before he had accepted Totty’s invitation, he accused himself of having known beforehand what would happen, and of having weakly yielded because he had liked the prospect of leading so luxurious an existence. What surprised him, however, and threw all his reflections out of balance was that Totty herself should not have foreseen the disaster, Totty the diplomatic, Totty the worldly, Totty the covetous, who would as soon have given her daughter to one of her servants as to penniless George Wood! It was past comprehension. Yet, in spite of his distress, he could hardly repress a smile as he imagined what Totty’s rage would be, should he marry Mamie and carry her off before the eyes of her horrified parent. Sherrington Trimm, himself, would be as well satisfied with him as with any other honest man, if he were sure of Mamie’s inclinations.

Now, however, something must be done at once. He was not a weak creature, like Constance Fearing, to hesitate for months and years, practising a deception upon himself which he had not the courage to carry to the end. He even regretted the last words he had spoken, and which had been prompted by a foolish wish not to hurt the girl’s feelings. It would have been better if he had left them unsaid. The situation must be defined, the harm arrested, if it could not be undone, and should it seem necessary, as it probably would, he himself must leave the place on the following morning. He opened his mouth to speak, but the blood rushed to his face and he could not articulate the words. He was overcome with shame and remorse and he would have chosen to do anything, to undergo any humiliation rather than this. But in a moment his strong nature gathered itself and grew strong, as it always did in the face of great difficulties. He hated hesitation and he would not hesitate, cost what it might. He was not cowardly, and he would not be afraid.

“Mamie,” he said, suddenly, and he wondered how his voice could be so gentle, “Mamie, I do not love you.”

He had expected everything, except what happened. Mamie looked into his eyes, and once again in the evening light the expression of her love transfigured her half pretty face and lent it a completeness of beauty such as he had never seen.

“Have you not told me that, dear?” she asked, half sadly, half lovingly. “It is not new. I have known it long.”

George stared at her for a moment.

“I feared I had not said it clearly,” he answered in low tones.

“Everything you have done and said has told me that, for two months past. Do not say it again.”

“I must go away from this place. I will go to-morrow.”

She looked up with startled eyes.

“Go away? Leave me? Ah, George, you will not be so unkind!”

The situation was certainly as strange as it was new, and George was very much confused by what was happening. His resolution to make everything clear was, however, as unbending as before.

“Mamie,” he said, “we must understand each other. Things must not go on as they have gone so long. If I were to stay here, do you know what I should be doing? I should be acting towards you as Constance Fearing acted with me, only it would be much worse, because I am a man, and I have no right to do such things, as women have.”

“It is different,” said the young girl, once more looking down into the water.

“No, it is not different,” George insisted. “I have no right to act as though I should ever love you, to make you think by anything I do or say, that such a thing is possible. I am a brute, I know. Forgive me, Mamie, dear. It is so much better that everything should be clearly understood now. We have known each other so long, and so well——”

“Nothing that you can say will make it seem right to me that you should go away——”

“It is right, nevertheless, and if I do not do it, as I should, I shall never forgive myself——”

“I will forgive you.”

“I shall hate myself——”

“I will love you.”

“I shall feel that I am the most miserable wretch alive.”

“I shall be happy.”