He raised her hand to his lips, and they passed on. The man on the bench had not moved, and they, as they uttered these last words, which were in effect a farewell, saw nothing and no one but each other. ‘I must go home. I cannot go on now,’ said Adrienne, as they arrived at the gate. ‘I will leave you. Good-bye.’ ‘Good-bye,’ said she, putting her hand in his, but not looking at him. He kept her hand in his so long that at last she looked up. ‘Dear Sebastian, I----’ ‘There, that is all I wanted,’ said he, with a rather faint smile. ‘God keep you, child. Good-bye!’ When Adrienne had left her home, it had been with the firm resolution to see Mary Heywood before returning. But she met Sebastian, and the visit was not accomplished. CHAPTER XII. ‘Great Mother Nature! Eternal good and blessed! Hear me! Hear my prayer! Forsake me not in this my need!’ Myles Heywood’s life had become worse and darker than merely a sad life. It was filled with a wretched pain and unrest, which had been growing like a disease for weeks. His was an earnest, passionate nature, deep and intense; but there was in it a well-spring of contentment, a something essentially sweet and wholesome, which, so long as no very disturbing element intruded, left him tolerably at ease with his life, in spite of the vague dissatisfaction and striving which had led him in earlier days to associate himself with radical working-men’s clubs; which had made him eagerly devour all kinds of iconoclastic literature, and which had often sent him home, on pay-day, meditating upon the unequal manner in which wealth was distributed. But he had had nothing to make him feel this inequality, keenly and cruelly, until, with one single circumstance, one single evening’s adventure, the turning-point in his life came, and he seemed all at once to realise the significance of all these things--wealth, station, and culture--in the shape of Adrienne Blisset. From that time his view of things was changed. He had seen what he felt to be the best, and most beautiful, and desirable thing in the world; and he did desire it with the ardour of a young man and a poet and a lover all combined, and with an ardour deeper still--the ardour of one who feels that everything great and high and satisfactory lies in one direction, and in the other, blackness, emptiness, death, if death be the opposite of life. He could never look back or down again; and yet, the more he looked forwards and upwards, the more did all he saw in the distance seem unattainable and impossible. He had quite ceased to visit Adrienne. To be with her now was only a prolonged ache and pain. He watched her wistfully, and noted in his heart each day that passed over without a visit from her. She used to come so often; now she never came at all. He knew--every one knew, that her uncle was dead, and that she was his heiress. More than once he had heard it was likely that she and Sebastian Mallory would be married.