It was high time, I felt, to reconsider my position in regard to Eric and Marion. At present the former knew nothing of my residence in the neighbourhood, or of the acquaintance I had formed with his cousin. His letters, always few and intermittent, had for some time ceased altogether. He was no doubt constantly on the move from one place of interest to another; so I had been unable to write to him the news of my appointment to Fleetwater, and, in the light of my recent discovery, I regarded his ignorance of my whereabouts as adding a fresh complication.If what the Rector had told me was true, and Riverdale was really inclined towards Marion, then my own position was about as difficult a one as could well be imagined. Even a man more conceited (I hope) than myself might well have paused in the presence of such a rival. The very points in his personality that had won him my devotion—his beauty and charm and careless indifference—might well prove equally attractive to his cousin. Add to which, there was his future and assured position, both likely to tell with her father, if not with herself, to say nothing of the chance that he might one day win fame and distinction as a painter.

And against all these advantages, what had I to offer in competition? Nothing, I assured myself repeatedly, nothing, nothing. Only a poor curacy and a moderate competence, while, of personal attraction, in comparison with Eric, again nothing, nothing. But this was the least of all my difficulties—far worse was the being brought into competition with my best and earliest friend; in particular, the self-consciousness that I was a gainer by his absence. When she began to talk of him, as assuredly she would do, so soon as she knew of our friendship, how was I to answer her? My own warm love and admiration for his merits would second and stimulate her own. The temptation, I am thankful to say, was gone before it was realised. Never, not for one moment, did my heart fail in its duty to my friend. Never did the thought even enter my mind of depreciating or disparaging his merits that I might better my own position. To have entertained the thought as possible would have seemed to me an act of incomparable baseness.

However, the thought and self-examination induced by the difficulty ended by dissipating it. The position, I saw, was for the time being irremediable, and I ended where I might have begun—by recognising that my own part must be that of a simple and unprejudiced onlooker, till Fate should have taken the guidance in her hand, and shown me in which direction she intended to turn the scales.

And if my praises of him should help his chances of success—so let it be. Love is not always given to the most attractive and deserving, while if he succeeded, better he, I said to myself, than any other. For him, if for anyone, I could be content, I thought, to stand aside and efface myself, almost without regret.

Meantime my own love, I determined, must be a silent and unsuspected one.

And so, when I met her the day after, I told her frankly of all my love for Riverdale; how he and I had grown up together with every thought in common, how he had befriended me at school, and stood by me at College, and how the first great grief of my life had been our necessity of parting.

She was pleased, I could see, with all my praise of him; pleased too, I thought, that we had discovered this new bond of sympathy between us, and could discuss his career with a mutual interest in his success.

“I wonder what it was,” she said one day, “that brought you and Eric so closely together,”—thereby reproducing the very difficulty that had often puzzled me. “Your natures are about as far removed as the Antipodes. Unless I’m much mistaken, yours is a strong and uncommonly decided character, with the most practical ideas of what life’s work should be. While he is a dear old indolent dreamer, with all the fascination of modern Alcibiades, but with none of the energy or ambition that characterised the splendid young Athenian.”

“Ah, there you are wrong, believe me, and will have to admit it before the world has grown much older. He has in him all the fire of the true artist,—latent it may be for a while. But sooner or later it’s bound to come to the fore. Even now he’s seeing things on the continent that will stimulate it into activity, and then he’ll show what’s in him and surprise us all.”

I had hardly entered upon this policy of masterly inactivity before I was tempted to abandon it. On a hot afternoon towards the end of June I was lazily whipping the Rectory stream on the chance of a trout, when Marion came down to me from the terrace, clad—or so it seemed to my uneducated gaze—in a diaphanous cloud of palest lavender, and holding in her hand an open letter. Then and there I became faithless to my conscience, for never had she appeared to me in prettier guise. Her dress—and I always like those confections of cloud-like tulle or gauze under whatever name they are scientifically known—was in perfect harmony with the cool green tints of the Rectory garden, while excitement, and she was excited now, always showed her at her best. It called up the tawny light that slept in her hazel eyes, and flushed the paleness of her cheeks, while the faintest breath of a summer wind saw its opportunity and played with the tangles of her ruddy hair.

Surely, I thought, I’m hypersensitive, even in respect for a love that has such claims on me as Eric’s. And after all, a man owes a duty to himself no less than to his friend.

“Good news!” she cried, as she floated to me down the steps. “I’m off to the archery fÊte, and am late already. But I couldn’t go without telling you that I’d heard at last from Eric, and, what’s more, we shall see him soon. He’s been through all the great galleries—Paris, Dresden, Florence, and Madrid. Since then he has been studying hard at Rome in one of the best studios. He says his master thinks a lot of him, and will dismiss him soon as needing only practice and hard work, which he can manage just as well in England as in Rome. Meantime, he’s having a really good time of it, making excursions between whiles to all the old towns, and especially to Aquila and the Abruzzi, where every step an artist takes gives him a fresh subject.

“But I must be off now,” she ran on. “Goodbye; I wish you were coming to the fÊte. But perhaps you are well out of it—(I thought the reverse)—for I know you don’t like archery. It’s too statuesque and Apollo-like for you—would suit Eric better, wouldn’t it? You would like something a little more real and murderous. By the way, I wonder you didn’t make a soldier of yourself.”

She left me almost bewildered by her beauty. And, like a true lover, I abandoned the Rectory trout to their own devices, while I mused and dreamed over my lady’s perfections. “Of course,” I said to myself, “Shakespeare is right, as he always is. Fancy is engendered in the eye; at least it was in my case; born before I had seen any reasons for its birth, in fact, in spite of many reasons to the contrary, as I recalled the well-remembered shock of Reggie’s love-scene. And it may either die in its cradle, or else turn to love, as mine did. Then how is it that the unattractive women find their husbands? I suppose there must be men to whom plainness, and even ugliness, can appear perfection. The answer is not forthcoming, and I give it up. At any rate, love’s a phase of feeling and an emotion (often untrue and misleading, by the way), not a deduction or an inference.”

And then a trout took my fly, and I left off dreaming dreams and landed it.

But her news had left me in a happier frame of mind, and I was already beginning to look forward to Eric’s arrival with a wistful eagerness, as certain to determine, in one direction or the other, this wearing period of anxiety and doubt. As a matter of fact, the issue was nearer than I anticipated, and events that followed rapidly had practically settled the decision before he came.