“That point is open to discussion,” said the scholar, slyly. “We possess the sage’s opinion of Xantippe, but we do not possess Xantippe’s opinion of the sage.” The weeks and months slipped by, and the fern was sear and brown in Windsor Great Park and Forest, and all the woodlands of Berkshire were leafless; but Eustace Thorburn showed no signs of distaste for his labours as secretary and amanuensis, collator and collaborateur. He languished for no change, he pined for no pleasure. His considerate employer had borrowed an extra horse from the stables of the great house, where there was still the remnant of a noble stud; and at his suggestion the young man took long rides in the early morning, before the day’s studious drudgery began. It was very pleasant to come home to breakfast in the snug old-fashioned parlour, and to be welcomed by Mademoiselle de Bergerac, whose bright eyes grew brighter at sight of some sprig of rare comb-bearing fern. Life at Greenlands seemed, indeed, to be altogether an existence of perfect and serene delight, only overshadowed now and then by the vague consciousness that it was too sweet to last. “The time will come when I shall have to pack my portmanteau and bid her good-bye,” the young man said to himself, in moments of sober meditation at night, when he sat alone in his pleasant room, and some break, some stagnation in the course of his composition brought him to a stand-still; “or some one will come and see her, and learn to love her as dearly as I love her even; and he will be in a position to say the sweet words I dare not say to her; and I shall hear the jangling village-bells some misty summer morning, and she will come in her white bridal dress to bid me farewell. Men have to bear such pain as that, and to bear it quietly.” By these reflections it will be seen that Eustace Thorburn, without fortune, friends, or name, and with the ever-present consciousness of the bar-sinister on his escutcheon, had presumed to fall in love with the only child of his employer. Could he have done otherwise? “Lives there a wretch with soul so dead” as to be able to inhabit the same dwelling with a Helen de Bergerac for six months and not own himself her worshipper and slave ere the sixth month is ended? Eustace Thorburn had surrendered himself an unresisting victim to the pitiless goddess who sways the weak souls of men, as her kinswoman Artemis rules the tides of ocean. He had allowed himself to be cradled in the shadowy arms of Fancy, rocked to the sweetest sleep that was ever broken by bitter waking. “I know that it must end in misery,” he said to himself; “but it is so sweet--while it lasts.”