Then, as he went over the past, he saw how this consciousness had been gradually invaded and broken up by his sister's letters. He remembered the incredulous impatience with which he had read the earlier ones. So, Marie thought him mistaken! 'Isabel Bretherton would be an actress yet'--'she had genius, after all'--'she was learning, growing, developing every day.' Absurd! _He_, had been able to keep his critical estimate of the actress and his personal admiration of the woman separate from one another. But evidently Marie's head had been confused, misled, by her heart. And then, little by little, his incredulity had yielded, and his point of view had changed. Instead of impatience of Marie's laxity of judgment, what he had been fiercely conscious of for days was jealousy of Paul de Châteauvieux--jealousy of his opportunities, his influence, his relation towards that keen sweet nature. That, too, had been one of his dreams of the future,--the dream of tutoring and training her young unformed intelligence. He had done something towards it; he had, as it were, touched the spring which had set free all this new and unexpected store of power. But, if he had planted, others had watered, and others would reap. In this great crisis of her fortunes he had been nothing to her. Other voices and other hands had guided and directed her. Her kindly, grateful messages only stung and tortured him. They seemed to him the merest friendly commonplace. In reality her life had passed out of his ken; her nature had flowered into a new perfection, and he had not been there to see or to help. She would never connect him with the incidents or the influences which had transformed existence to her, and would probably irrevocably change the whole outline of her future. Once he had wounded and startled her, and had despaired for awhile of undoing the impression made upon her. But now he felt no quick anxiety, no fear how things might turn, only a settled flat consciousness of division, of a life that had once been near to his swept away from him for ever, of diverging roads which no kindly fate would ever join again.