A fortnight went by. Fan, occupied in her shop and happy enough, except once when she encountered the grisly manager's terrible eyes on her: then she trembled and glanced down at her dress, fearing that it had looked rusty or out of shape to him; for in that establishment a heavy fine or else dismissal would be the lot of any girl who failed to look well-dressed. Constance, for the most part sitting solitary at home, trying in vain to write something that would meet the views of some editor. Merton, busy running about, full to overflowing of all the things he intended doing. Eden, doing nothing: only thinking, which, in his case at all events, was “but an idle waste of thought.” So inactive was he at this period, and so much tobacco did he consume to assist his mental processes, that he grew languid and pale. His friends remarked that he was looking seedy. This made him angry--very angry for so slight a cause; and he thought that of all the intolerable things that have to be put up with this was the worst--that people should remark to a man that he is looking seedy, when the seediness is in the soul, and the cause of it a secret of which he is ashamed. At the end of the fortnight he became convinced that his feeling for the delicate girl with the pathetic grey eyes was no passing fancy, but a passion that stirred him as he had never been stirred before, and he resolved to possess her in spite of the fact that he had met her in his friend's house. “Let the great river bear me to the main,” he said; although bad, he was too honest to quote the other line, feeling that he had not striven against the stream. Having got so far, he began to consider what the first step was to be in this enterprise of great pith and moment. For although the insanity of passionate desire possessed him, he was not going to spoil his chances by acting in a hurry, or doing anything without the most careful consideration. The desire to see her again was very insistent, and by strolling up the street in which she lived in the evening he might easily have met her, by chance as it were, returning from her shop, but he would not do that. An enterprise of this kind seemed to him like one of those puzzle-games in which if a right move is made at first the game may be won, however many blundering moves may follow; but if the first move is wrong, then by no possible skill and care can the desired end be reached.