The strange reticence of his demeanor to Emily, courteous, frank, kind and loving, it is true, but yet so unlike the abandonment she might have looked for in a lover; the curious attentions of Emily to him, her lustrous looks into his face, her fond, close leaning on his arm, her form bending so near him, her restless desire to isolate herself with him even when she and Wentworth were present, her low tones and whisperings, and smiles, tokens of love, and yet somehow vaguely unloverlike; all came to her vividly, and like an ordinary page in a book which yet contained a lurking riddle that distracted the mind from the ostensible reading. Then their strange reserve. Emily had never intimated aught of her love to her, save in the conversation which she herself had instituted to charm down her lover-like jealousy, and the admission then was rather tacit than direct. And Harrington, too—he had never breathed a word, or given the remotest hint of his love to her—not even to her, his adored and trusted friend. Why this secrecy? What imaginable reason had they for this close conspiracy of reserve? She could not guess. She could not even invent a plausible supposition to account for it. In the candid and vivid temper of her mind that night, she felt that the mystery of their relation and conduct would be fathomed by her, could she but keep it before her thoughts; but in vain, for as she held it, it would drop away, and be lost in the phantasmagoric population which crowded and faded upon her, and then appear again, and again be lost; and so crowding and fading, and coming again, in quiet and spectral complication, with a vague sense of mystery, and monition and shadowy warning, all mingling indefinitely together, and leaving no result in her mind, her phantom host of useless reminiscence poured ceaselessly around her, as the moon was going down. As the moon was going down its sad ray, filtering between a tunnelled lane of roofs and walls across the garden gate of Harrington, touched his drooping forehead, as he sat near his open window, breathing the refreshing coolness of the night air. His night-lamp left the lower part of the room in dusky shadow, but threw a steady radiance on the open volume from which he had risen when he could no longer abstract his mind to the rich pages. He was thinking of his own future—how he should arrange his life for the human service. The dream of love was dissolved; henceforth it could never agitate his heart; now he was wholly and only mankind’s. She had receded from him into the farthest distance of memory. He thought of her as of one whom he had known and loved many, many years ago. Now she was gone, and he was alone, and for him there was only the clouded present and the unknown future.