“I know you are impatient to hear why I am not nearer England--even at Paris--and I am just as impatient to tell you. The address of this will show you where I am. All the writing in the world could not tell you why. No, Drayton; I lie awake at night, questioning, questioning, and in vain. I have gone to the nicest anatomy of my motives, dissecting fibre by fibre, and may I be--a Queen’s officer--if I can hit upon an explanation of the mystery. The nearest I can come is, that I feel the place dangerous to me, and, therefore, I cling to it. I know well the feeling that would draw a man back to the spot where he had committed a great crime. Blood is a very glutinous fluid, and has most cohesive properties; but here, in this place, I have done no enormities, and why I hug this coast, except that it be a lee-shore, where shipwreck is very possible, I really cannot make out Not a bit in love? No, Algy. It is not easy for a man like me to fall in love. Love demands a variety of qualities, which have long left me, if I ever had them. I have little trustfulness, no credulity; I very seldom look back, never look forward; I neither believe in another, nor ask belief in myself. I have seen too much of life to be a dreamer--reality with me denies all place to mere romance. Last of all I cannot argue from the existence of certain qualities in a woman to the certainty of her possessing fifty others that I wish her to have. I only believe what I see, and my moral eyes are affected with cataract; and yet, with all this, there’s a girl here--the same, ay, the same, I told you of long ago--that I’d rather marry than I’d be King of Agra, with a British governor-general for my water- carrier! The most maddening of all jealousy is for a woman that one is not in love with! I am not mad, most noble Drayton, though I am occasionally as near it as is safe for the surrounders. With the same determination that this girl says she’ll not have me, have I sworn to myself she shall be mine. It is a fair open game, and I leave _you_, who love a wager, to name the winner. I have seen many prettier women-- scores ol cleverer ones. I am not quite sure that in the matter of those social captivarions into which manner enters, she has any especial gifts. She is not a horsewoman, in the real sense of the word, which, once on a time, was a sine quâ non of mine; nor, in fact, has she a peculiar excellence in anything, and yet she gives you the impression of being able to be anything she likes. She has great quickness and great adaptiveness, but she possesses one trait of attraction above all; she utterly rejects _me_, and sets all my arts at defiance. I saw, very soon after I came back here, that she was prepared for a regular siege,