'Delusion! Were Colonel Rakes, Desmond, and I all deluded alike? It is an impossibility!' He actually doubted her, and bitter as the doubt must be of that one loves, deep must be the love that struggles against it, and his was of that kind. Clare reminded him of his promised visit at Christmas-time. 'Shall I go, to be snared again by the witchery of Ida's violet eyes and the golden gleam of her auburn hair?' The most rankling and bitter wounds are those of the heart; because they are unseen, and, too often, untellable; so Vane, amid the bitterness of his doubt, consoled, or strove to console himself with the remark of a Scottish writer, who says, 'How humbling it is to think that the strongest affections which have perplexed, or agitated, or delighted us from our birth, will, in a few years, cease to have an existence on the earth; and that all the ardour which they have kindled will be as completely extinguished and forgotten as if they had never been!' Love for him certainly seemed to have been dawning in her heart again; else whence that kiss--somewhat too sisterly, perhaps--which she accorded to him so frankly in the oriel window, filling his bosom with the old joy? Across the sunshine that was brightening his path why should this marring shadow have fallen, giving a pain that was only equalled in intensity by his love? hence it was simply horrid to hear a man like Desmond say, mockingly: 'You ask me about that fellow in the arbour so often that, by Jove, Vane, you are becoming spoony on her again--heard you were so once, don't you know--threw you over for Beverley, and all that sort of thing. Fact is, my dear fellow, women always betray those who love them too much. Never throw your heart further away than just so far that you can easily recover it.' And with his thoughts elsewhere, Jerry, spoiled as women of the world will spoil a drawing-room pet, lingered on amid a gay circle in London, endowed with a vague flirting commission, and coquetted a little with the languid, the soft, and the lovely, to hide or heal the wound that Ida had inflicted; while it was with regret, and a sense of as much irritation and hauteur as her gentle nature was capable of feeling, Ida heard that Vane was to accompany Chute (after all that had passed between them, and his suspicions) to Carnaby Court, where now the beeches and elms were all yellow or brown with the last tints of autumn, and the tall trees in the chase showed flushes of crimson, purple, and orange when the sun was sinking beyond the uplands in the west. On very different terms were Clare and _her_ lover; and in their letters they wrote freely and confidently of their future--a happy time that seemed certain now--the future that had once been but as the mirage that Chute had often beheld on the march in the sandy deserts of Aijmere.