had no hopes; he knew it was madness; yet it was a madness he was permitted, even encouraged in; and he gave himself up to it, and let himself float down the stream, and said to himself that he would shut his eyes, and take what happiness he could get in the present moment, and shut out all thoughts of the future. This he was doing with a kind of thrill of prodigal delight, selling his birthright for a mess of pottage, giving up all the freshness of his heart, and all its force of early passion, for what?--for nothing. To throw another flower in the path of a girl who trod upon nothing but flowers; this was what he felt it to be in his saner moments. But the influence of that sanity never stopped him in what he was doing. He had never in his life met with any thing like her, and if she chose to have this supreme luxury of a man’s heart and life offered up to her all for nothing--what then? He was not the man to grudge her that richest and most useless gift. It was not often he went so deep as this, or realized what a wild cause he was embarked on: but when he did, he saw the matter clearly enough, and knew how it must be. As for Sara, she was very innocent of any such thoughts. She was not the girl to accept such a holocaust. If she had known what was in his heart, possibly she might have scorned him for it; but she never suspected what was passing in his heart. She did not know of that gulf fixed. His real position, that position which was so very true and unquestionable to him, was not real at all to Sara. He was a fairy prince, masquerading under that form for some reason known to himself and Mr. Brownlow; or if not that, then he was the man to whom, according to her father’s will, she was to give herself blindly out of pure filial devotion. Anyhow something secret, mysterious, beyond ordinary ken, was in it; something that gave piquancy to the whole transaction. She was not receiving a lover in a commonplace sort of way when she entertained young Powys, but was instead a party to an important transaction, fulfilling a grand duty, either to her father menaced by some danger, or to a hero transformed whom only the touch of a true maiden could win back to his rightful shape. As it happened, this fine devotion was not disagreeable to her; but Sara felt, no doubt, that she would have done her duty quite as unswervingly had the fairy prince been bewitched into the person of the true Beast of the story instead of that of her father’s clerk.