‘It will go on until circumstances favour my passion, until I can win my way to her friendship, to her confidence; until I can say to her, without fear of repulse or discouragement, “Jane, I love you.” I am quite content to serve a longish apprenticeship, even to classical music, for the sake of that reward.’ Lucius stretched out his hand, and the two men’s broad palms met in the grasp of friendship. ‘Upon my honour, Geoffrey, I admire you,’ said the surgeon. ‘I won’t preach any more. Granted that your passion is foolish, at least it’s thorough. I honour a man who can say to himself, “That woman I will marry, and no other; that woman I will follow, through honour and dishonour, evil report and good report—”’ ‘Stop,’ cried Geoffrey; ‘let there be no mention of dishonour in the same breath with her name. If I did not believe in her truth and purity, I would pluck this passion out of my breast—as the Carthusian prior in the mediæval legend plucked deadly sin out of the entrails of St. Hugo of Lincoln—though I cut my heart open to do it. I love her, and I believe in her.’ ‘And if you ceased to believe in her, you would cease to love her?’ ‘Yes,’ answered Geoffrey Hossack firmly. He had risen from his seat by the hearth, and was pacing the dusky chamber, where the street lamps without and the red fire within made a curious half-light. Truly had his friend called him thorough. Intense, passionate, and impulsive was this generous nature—a nature which had never been spoiled by that hard school in which all men must learn whose first necessity is to get their living, that dreary breadwinner’s academical career to which God condemned Adam as the direst punishment of his disobedience and deceit. ‘No longer shalt thou wander careless in these flowery vales and groves, where generous emotions and affectionate impulses and noble thoughts might bud and blossom in the happy idlesse. For thee, sinner, the daily round of toil, the constant hurry, the ever-goading pressure of sordid necessities, which shall make thee selfish and hard and remorseless, with no leisure in which to be kind to thy brother strugglers, with hardly a pause in which to remember thy God!’ CHAPTER IV. ‘O WORLD, HOW APT THE POOR ARE TO BE PROUD!’ Lucius thought much of his friend after that frank confession at the Cosmopolitan. Geoffrey had dined none the less well because of his passion. He had eaten oysters, and bisque soup, and stewed calves’ head with truffles, and mutton, and wild duck, with the appetite that had been educated in an American pine-forest; had drunk Château d’Yquem, and Chambertin, and wound up with curaçoa, and had waxed merry to riotousness as the evening grew late,—Lucius taking but a moderate share in the revel, yet enjoying it. Was it not a glimpse of a new life, after the Shadrack-road, where pleasure had a universal flavour of gin-and-water?