I stepped back, and she came down the two steps with her face averted. I thought I could let her go; it was my plain soldier duty. But when the fragrance of her was in my nostrils I lost my hold on duty and all else. “One word, Beatrix, for God’s sake!” I muttered, praying that the words might go to her ears alone. “I must see you before you quit this house, if only for five little minutes! You can’t deny me this!” She left me without the promise, without a word, without the slightest inclination of the proud head, and I sank fathoms deep into the pit of wretchedness. And, as if to make my punishment the sharper, in another minute I saw her chatting gaily with a little whipper-snapper British coxcomb of an ensign whom I could most joyously have broken in two across my knee. As may readily be imagined, there was a miserable hour or two for me after this; it might have been a longer or a shorter time, I do not know. The clocks were all stopped for me, and I know that I lived ages head-under in the slime-pit of despair, coming to the surface at intervals, when I had a glimpse of her dancing, as she always danced, the very poetry of motion, with one or another of the house guests, each new man transforming himself, or being transformed, into my bitterest foe because he had my place. Arnold I saw only once or twice, and scarcely gave him a second thought; and as for Champe, whom I might easily have hunted out now since he was probably hanging about the door, I had forgotten the worthy sergeant-major’s existence. So selfish and single-eyed is a great love aroused and well convinced that it has lost its all. During these ages of wretchedness, in which my own dismal misery was only made the blacker by the lights and the gay company filling the rooms to overflowing, she never gave me a look or made me a sign to show that she remembered my presence in the house of merrymaking. But when I could endure it no longer--it was while she was sitting out a dance with that same popinjay ensign that I had desired to break in two--I made my opportunity, passing in plainest view of her on my way to a hothouse garden pavilion connected by a covered entryway with the drawing-room where she was sitting. The air of the hothouse place was dense and heavy with the perfume of blooming plants, and there was little light save that which filtered through the glass roof and came from a sort of cresset-lamp bracketed to the housewall outside and overhead. But with all its pent-up fragrance, or perhaps, because of it, the glass house was empty, and I flung myself down upon a settle to wait, hoping against hope that she would relent and come and give me a word with her, though what that word should be, I had no more idea than a simpleton.