Men of few or no friendships have a very undivided passion to bestow when at last the call comes to them. At the same time such are wont to signalise the early stages of their complaint by a diffidence so exaggerated as that, in the nature of nature, it must degenerate in course into a desperately injured vanity. It is to be feared that, at this period of his ailing, Ned was horribly big with a sense of grievance generally against the social order, that seemed so parsimonious of the favours (as represented by one only favour, in fact) that his position entitled him to draw upon. What was the good, in short, of being possessed of acres, a lordship, an agreeable personality, if all could not procure him the single modest gift he had ever asked of Fortune? That was a sentiment for his bitterest moods. In his more reasonable, he would acknowledge to himself, with a sorrowful rapture, that no human desert could prove itself worthy of the Hebe-goddess at whose pretty feet he had worshipped. So he waited on and on--because irresolution, also, is a necessary concomitant of extreme diffidence. He waited on, remote from his natural state, constantly on the prick of flight, yet always fearing to move, lest a vilely humorous destiny should take his sudden decision for the point to a game of cross-purposes. He waited on, shrinking ever more into his unwholesome self; avoiding company--comradeship, even; but half-conscious of the screeching barbaric world about him; hearing only distant echoes from the world over-seas. Now and again it would occur to him--upon his receipt of those periodic advices from his steward that made the almost sum of his communications with a life that had grown curiously shadowy to him--to put his own native instruments (in the person of this same steward) to the use of ascertaining and reporting upon the movements of Madame de Genlis and her charges. But always he was faced thereupon by a score ghosts of apprehension--that such confidences might beget familiarities vulgarising to the aloofness of his passion; that the necessary interval that must elapse before he could procure a reply must debar him from the independence of action that he still claimed, without enjoying; most, that the coveted news itself, when it should reach him, might do no better than confirm a haunting fear. And so he dwelt on, passing at last, it seemed, into the very winter of his discontent.