She read the verses beautifully, and as if her voice loved to linger on them. Marsham listened with a friendly tenderness, half sad, half genial; but his companion was apparently looking for signs of some deeper feeling. A look of disappointment flitted across her face; and, with a slight change of manner, she took him out into the garden. "Let us come," she said, to our old seat-our old seat under the citrons and the oranges "Do Under the orange-trees they sat down together in silence. you find me much changed, Mr. Marsham?" she at last said abruptly. In her face he did find her changed; and that was all he was thinking of. But he could not say this to her; and so he answered "No." 66 Perhaps," she said, with a faint smile, "that is because you have not cared to observe me closely. But I have observed you; and you are changed, at any rate. No, not in your face, for as far as that goes you look fresher than ever, and far less thoughtful—or perhaps it would sound better if I said thought worn. Tell me," she added presently, "do you ever write any poetry now?" "I have written," he said, a few jingling rhymes for music;, but except that, nothing for five years. But wait, let me beg you wait for a single moment, whilst I watch the delicious orange-leaves, as they move and murmur over me, against the clear delicious sky. Let us have a moment's golden silence-as golden as those 'happy, hanging orange-orbs. 66 66 He leaned back with his face turned upwards, and watched with a dreamy intensity the sky, the fruit, and the foliage. Yes," he exclaimed suddenly, again turning to his companion, who had been watching him as he had been watching the orange-trees; 66 'you are right. I am changed. I have forfeited by this time all claims on the friendship I once had from you. You liked me once because I was * Eschylus, Agamemnon, 400-415 young and impetuous, and because I would quote poetry by the hour to you. Now, I have no eagerness, no enthusiasm left in me; and without that there is no poetry possible." 66 "And yet," she said, 'you looked happy enough this morning; and whenever I hear of you, I hear of you as enjoying yourself. "Ah!" he answered, "but I did not tell you I was miserable. I should be a far more interesting person if I were, both to myself and others. But I have not even energy enough to be embittered or disappointed. Life, I find, is not the thing I thought it was; but I feel no anger at it, because it has deceived me. I merely smile at myself for having been the victim of the deceit. Where is my anger, where is my hate gone? Some of my old spirit would return if I could only recover these. Can you advise me, Lady Di, how to recover my anger?" "Would it not be more to the purpose," she said hurriedly, “if you asked how to recover your love? If you had ever been really in love, you would not Have occasion, you would say, to lament that my disappointment was not bitter enough to me." "Do not laugh," she said gently, "for I am speaking to you with all earnestness. If you had ever really loved, life would never seem a blank to you. It might, indeed, be bitter; but even in the bitterness there would be something holy; and you would never, never sink to the shallow ennui that you now say oppresses you." 66 You 'It is not so," said Marsham, getting more animated; "for I know what love is, and that too has failed me. It has failed me like the rest of life, and for the same reason. It is but the fragment of a far greater loss. When you knew me I was full of romance. little guessed," he added with some feeling, "how full." Lady Di flushed crimson, and her breath came quickly. But you knew me," he went on, "not, as we both of us thought, in the sunrise of my maturer manhood; but in what really was the sunset of my youth, and of the faith that my youth had lived on." 66 Lady Di fixed her eyes on him with a look of soft compassion. 'My poor friend," she said, "you are very young still, and all this dejection means merely that you have not found the right person, You have lost your faith in God, have you? It is a great misfortune, doubtless. But many true-hearted men and women have suffered the same; and have loved each other none the less, perhaps even the better for it. And your case, if you please, can of course be the same as theirs. If you will only learn of me, I may, I think, be able to help you. I have heard of the life you lead, of the idle selfishness and the frivolity of it; of your perpetual restless search after its shallowest pleasures. I have heard of the people you associate with -of the women like Mrs. Crane, and of the men like Lord Surbiton. I have watched to-day your manner amongst them; and the picture I had formed of you is, I see, a true one, Yourself, your affections, and your interests are as light as a butterfly's wings, but as weak and as inconstant also. You are moving through the world without one earnest thought to guide, or without one earnest work to anchor you. Is it in that way, do you think, that faith is to be recovered? If you would ever believe in the supernatural, you must first give your affections some stake in the natural. Or," she continued, looking into his eyes inquiringly, "if your hour has not yet come, if you have not yet discovered the woman that will wake up all your sleeping manhood, you can at least do what is the other half of your dutyyou can work for all those depending on you; you can help to pro. mote their happiness. You "I am a rich man now," said Marsham, "and, as you say, I have many depending on me. But how do you think I behave towards them? To you I seem only an idler, and a pleasure-seeker. know nothing of the dull and weary hours that I give to business; the dull and weary weeks that I spend at my own place in the country; the petty wretched details with which I occupy myself, that I may do what is called 'my duty' by all to whom I can be of any help." "Is this indeed so?" she said. "And do you mean to say that you find no pleasure in the-in the thought that you are making others happy?" "If I did not do what I could," he said, "I should be certainly miserable. But to do all I can, does but save me from that, and preserve me on the dull dead level of painlessness. I am not enthusiastic even about my own life. Why should I be enthusiastic about the lives of others?" 66 'You are right," she said, "you are right. If you can see nothing in this life worth winning for yourself, and nothing iu this life that it would make you miserable to miss, your labours for others will be but the dull round of a treadmill. Our own inner lives and loves must be the light of our world for each of us; and if the light, my friend, that is in us be darkness, oh, how great is that darkness! But I do not yet despair of you. Some day or other, you will learn to love, and then the whole aspect of things will change for you. The old sense of life's worth and solemnity will come back again; you will again be eager, again an enthusiast, and again, perhaps, a poet." "I have told you," said Marsham, "that I have known love already, but it had for me none of that magic power that you gave it credit for." 66 Was it Tell me," said Lady Di tremulously, "when was that? before you knew me, or was it afterwards? You said you were more full of romance when I knew you first than perhaps I suspectod." “I was indeed," said Marsham, "for the very time I was here, I knew the very feeling that you say would save me, but which in reality has done so very little. I was in love-in love as deeply, as madly, as ever you could recommend me to be.” She looked at him with a bewildered expression. L M 2-14 "But why," she said, after a pause, did you tell me nothing of this? Did I not deserve your confidence? Were you afraid to be quite open with me? Oh, my friend, do not be afraid of me." ‘Surely,” said Marsham, “I told you all I could. All the subjects that had any common interest for us, I discussed freely with you, as brother would with sister. Bnt brothers are shy of telling sisters their love-affairs; and so I was shy with you." 66 For some moments she was mute. Suddenly the fashion of her countenance changed, as his meaning dawned on her. "And so," she began, you were in love with some other woman-with the lady, I mean (she corrected herself angrily) "who had the honour to lose your affections as soon as she had completed to you the full gift of her confidence! Indeed, Mr. Marsham, if your affections are of that kind, I do not wonder they have failed to reveal the earnestness and value of life to you. And so you flatter yourself you were in love, at that time—really in love, do you? My poor friend, you make me smile to see how you deceive yourself. I should have thougut that a school-boy would have known life better. That poor phase of feeling you were then passing through, I had known and done with three years before. Time was when I left my heart behind me at every country-house I stayed at; but it was sure to come after me in a day or two, like a sponge-bag or a washing-bill; and foolish girl though I was, I never really thought that trifling to be love. Myself, I have never loved. But I know that I know what the passion is, because I am so sure I have never felt it; and so sure also that you have not. Why, at the very time you speak of, were not you loitering here with me, finding pleasure in my society, and hanging over every word I uttered?" "And why should I not?" said Marshám. "You were a woman of taste and intellect. You had thought, and read, and discriminated, and I could discuss things freely with you that I could with no one` else. What, according to your view of the matter, are the contents of a true lover's vows? When he says to a woman, 'I love you,' does that mean also, You understand all my thoughts'? or does it else mean, I will never harbour or utter a thought that you are incapable of understanding'? Why, it takes two or three people to understand even the meanest personality. And because one woman had my genial sympathy, can this show you that another had not my love? "" "Heavens!" she said impetuously, "do you know so little as to think that were a man in love really he could endure to be absent, without necessity, a day from the woman he was in love with? No; he is never happy when away from her. All amusements, unless she shares them, are vapid; and to give to another one of the inner thoughts of his heart would, he feels, be sacrilege. They are all sacred to her; they are all precious for her sake. They are flowers in the garden of his soul which he plucks lovingly, one by one, for her, and for her only, and which he labours to keep sweet and taintless, that she may lay them in her own bosom.” "If that is love," said Marsham, "I have not only never known it, but I hope I never may know it. The woman I loved could not read Greek plays: you could. And will you say I was not in love, because I was not prepared to renounce for ever all sympathy in so refined and so harmless a taste as the Athenian drama?" "This is not a matter," she exclaimed, 'for reason and logic. The kingdom of love does not come with observation. Your heart, not your head, must reveal it to you. But if you have no heart, as you are doing your best to convince me, then God help you! Why, love in the inner world is what the sun is in the outer; and if your inner world is a sunless one, I could no more show you that life was a precious thing than I could show you that the sea was blue at midnight." "Reason," said Marsham, "cannot kindle love; but reason assuredly can quench it." "Nonsense!" she cried contemptuously. "What man can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?" "You cannot by reason," he said, cure love as a caprice; but the love which is a caprice only is not the love you speak of. And love as an absorbing and life-long devotion, which takes into itself a man's whole ambitions and emotions-love like this reason assuredly can quench, for those at least who have no faith to sustain them. Such love, you say, is the sun of the inner world. You are mistaken. It is not the sun, it is the moon. The moon is human affection, but the sun is divine faith. You, who are a Catholic, forget all this; for you know nothing of the loss from which others are suffering. But to offer love to those who have lost religion is to tell the poor to eat jam tarts, when they cry to you that they have got no bread." "I forget nothing," she said angrily. "I am a Catholic, it is true, and I trust I value my religion properly. But religion has nothing to do with the present question. You are beginning the matter at the wrong end. If you want to be a religious man, you must first be a man; and you are not a man if you do not know how to love. How will you love God, whom you have not seen, if you do not love your brother, whom you have seen?" "That does but mean," he replied, "that if the tree is healthy it will bear fruit; not that we can have fruit without having a tree to bear it. You are confounding two things. Love is either a sacrament or a self-indulgence. If it be the former, the very essence of it is that it points to something beyond itself; and its power, in that case, must die if our belief in that something ceases. If it be the latter, it is a feeling only "A feeling only!" she exclaimed; "yes, indeed, it is a feeling |