“For happiness it was, though certainly of curious kind. He perfectly believed her to be engaged to marry another man, one too, whom he could quite imagine it possible that she cared for sincerely, though not perhaps to the full extent that a nature such as hers was capable of. He believed, too, that under any circumstances, it would have been impossible for her to care for him, the man Ralph Severn, to even this same small extent; besides which his circumstances were such that he considered marriage, at least for many years to come, as all but out of the question for him. He knew all this, he repeated it over to himself a dozen times a day—and yet—and yet—he could not stay away from her; it was happiness even to be in the same room with her. She was so sweet, so gentle; and yet so bright and intelligent! A merely sweet and gentle woman would not have contented Ralph Severn; would not, though her beauty might have ten times exceeded that of Marion Vere, have made him feel, as she did, that here indeed was one who suited him—yes, “to the innermost fibre of his being.” So he went on, playing, alas, with edged tools; knowing full well that the day was not far distant when they would cut him, and deeply too. But thinking not, be it remembered in his defence, that there was the slightest danger of their wounding another as well as himself. Another, not perhaps capable of deeper suffering than he, but a gentle, tender creature. One to whom such suffering would be hard and strange; who would not, improbably, sink altogether beneath it. And one, too, whom he loved—this strong, brave man—loved, though as yet he hardly knew it, so entirely, so intensely, that to save her, he would gladly have agreed to bear through life the burden of her sorrow in addition to his own. But for this little space, he went dreaming on. There was not just yet anything exactly to awaken him. Besides, he thought himself so particularly wide awake! The remembrance of Frank Berwick’s existence was never absent from him. He looked upon it as a sort of charm, a safeguard against any possible imprudence. Every now and then he used to give himself a little prick with it, as a sort of wholesome reminder, as it were. He noticed certainly that the young man was seldom, if ever, named by either Mrs. Archer or Marion; but that, under the circumstances, was not to be wondered at.