“That is what puzzles me, sir,” answered Tom, passing his hand over his forehead. “And I don’t know if I can explain it. “Think over it, and try.” Tom mused for some moments and then began. “You see, sir, that I was a very different man myself when I fell in love with Jessie Wiles, and said, ‘Come what may, that girl shall be my wife. Nobody else shall have her.’” “Agreed; go on.” “But while I was becoming a different man, when I thought of her--and I was always thinking of her--I still pictured her to myself as the same Jessie Wiles; and though, when I did see her again at Graveleigh, after she had married--the day--” “You saved her from the insolence of the Squire.” “She was but very recently married. I did not realize her as married. I did not see her husband, and the difference within myself was only then beginning. Well, so all the time I was reading and thinking, and striving to improve my old self at Luscombe, still Jessie Wiles haunted me as the only girl I had ever loved, ever could love; I could not believe it possible that I could ever marry any one else. And lately I have been much pressed to marry some one else; all my family wish it: but the face of Jessie rose up before me, and I said to myself, ‘I should be a base man if I married one woman, while I could not get another woman out of my head.’ I must see Jessie once more, must learn whether her face is now really the face that haunts me when I sit alone; and I have seen her, and it is not that face: it may be handsomer, but it is not a girl’s face, it is the face of a wife and a mother. And, last evening, while she was talking with an open-heartedness which I had never found in her before, I became strangely conscious of the difference in myself that had been silently at work within the last two years or so. Then, sir, when I was but an ill-conditioned, uneducated, petty village farrier, there was no inequality between me and a peasant girl; or, rather, in all things except fortune, the peasant girl was much above me. But last evening I asked myself, watching her and listening to her talk, ‘If Jessie were now free, should I press her to be my wife?’ and I answered myself, ‘No.’” Kenelm listened with rapt attention, and exclaimed briefly, but passionately, “Why?” “It seems as if I were giving myself airs to say why. But, sir, lately I have been thrown among persons, women as well as men, of a higher class than I was born in; and in a wife I should want a companion up to their mark, and who would keep me up to mine; and ah, sir, I don’t feel as if I could find that companion in Mrs. Somers.”