And so the time drifted on--and with its drifting her work drifted too, and only one all-absorbing passion possessed her life with its close and consuming fire. Amadis de Jocelyn was an expert in the seduction of a soul--little by little he taught her to judge all men as worthless save himself, and all opinions unwarrantable and ill-founded unless he confirmed them. And, leading her away from the contemplation of high visions, he made her the blind worshipper of a very inadequate idol. She was happy in her faith, and yet not altogether sure of happiness. For there are two kinds of love--one with strong wings which lift the soul to a dazzling perfection of immortal destiny,--the other with gross and heavy chains which fetter every hope and aspiration and drag the finest intelligence down to dark waste and nothingness. CHAPTER IX In affairs of love a woman is perhaps most easily ensnared by a man who can combine passion with pleasantry and hot pursuit with social tact and diplomacy. Amadis de Jocelyn was an adept at this kind of thing--he was, if it may be so expressed, a refined libertine, loving women from a purely physical sense of attraction and pleasure conveyed to himself, and obtusely ignorant of the needs or demands of their higher natures. From a mental or intellectual standpoint all women to him were alike, made to be "managed" alike, used alike, and alike set aside when their use was done with. The leaven of the Jew or the Turk was in the temperament of this descendant of a long line of French nobles, who had gained their chief honours by killing men, ravishing women and plundering their neighbours' lands--though occasional flashes of bravery and chivalry had glanced over their annals in history like the light from a wandering will o' the wisp flickering over a morass. Gifted in his art, but wholly undisciplined in his nature, he had lived a life of selfish aims to selfish ends, and in the course of it had made love to many women,--one especially, on whose devoted affections he had preyed like an insect that ungratefully poisons the flower from which it has sucked the honey. This woman, driven to bay at last by his neglect and effrontery, had roused the scattered forces of her pride and had given him his conge--and he had been looking about for a fresh victim when he met Innocent. She was a complete novelty to him, and stimulated his more or less jaded emotions,--he found her quaint and charming as a poet's dream of some nymph of the woodlands,--her manner of looking at life and the things of life was so deliciously simple--almost mediaeval,--for she believed that a man should die rather than break his word or imperil his honour, which to Jocelyn was such a primitive state of things as to seem prehistoric. Then there was her fixed and absurd "fancy" about the noble qualities and manifold virtues of the French knight who had served the Duc d'Anjou,--and who had been to her from childhood a kind of lover in the spirit,--a being