The commission given him by Lady William to find this woman, so strange and incomprehensible a commission, and which was not explained in any way, roused all the indefinite feelings of disgust, and a kind of despair which had filled his mind from the moment of her reappearance (after a long interval, in which he had been of opinion that she was permanently shaken off) in the house. He had expressed to his mother so distinctly his objection to her presence, that it was difficult for him to reopen the subject, and still more difficult to suggest, as he was tempted to do, that since Mrs. Swinford could not live without her, it would be better on the whole that she should come to live in the house than haunt it clandestinely. Difficult, however, as these overtures were, he felt the necessity of making them, as soon as he understood that the finding of Artémise was necessary to his friend. What would not he have done to serve her, to please her? The laugh with which she had turned off his offer of service, the suggestion that such offers belonged to the regions of fairy tales, had scarcely been necessary to show Leo how futile, so far as she was concerned, was his devotion. But this conviction rarely puts an end to devotion, and it must be said that as there is fashion in all things, it was not disagreeable to Leo’s fashion of man to entertain a devotion of this kind, however hopeless, for an older woman, whom it was, in the nature of things, impossible that he could ever marry. In the nature of things as seen by her, that is to say, and which he clearly divined. His double breeding as Frenchman and Englishman did him service in this complication of fate. As an Englishman he was aware that such relationships as are possible to a Frenchman’s ideal, without apparently injuring it in his standard of honour, were here as impossible as that the sky should fall: while as Frenchman he was not so determined on that strong step of marriage which seems the foregone conclusion of love in an Englishman’s eyes. He was willing to be utterly devoted to this lady of dreams who was not for him, and to ask no more, seeing that more could not be--but that her wishes should be obeyed and her commissions executed at whatever cost, was the thing most certain to his mind. ‘Mother,’ he said, on the first occasion when he had the possibility of an interview, for Mrs. Swinford, after the little controversy over Lord Will, had exercised her usual caprice, appearing only when she pleased at the common table, and ‘was not well enough’ to receive even her own son in her boudoir, ‘you have, I think, a very frequent visitor.’ ‘I--have very frequent visitors! Where do I find them? I should be glad if you would tell me, Leo.’ ‘I have no desire to be disagreeable, mother--you have Artémise.’