Sir Laurence Alsager's angry mood was of short duration. The day after that interview in which he had spoke words that he had never intended to speak, and heard words which he had never thought to hear, he felt that a great change had fallen upon him. This woman who had rejected his love, not because she did not reciprocate it, but because it was unlawful; this woman who had had the strongest and subtlest temptation which can assail the human heart set before her--the temptation at once of consolation and of retaliation, of revenge upon the husband who had deceived and the enemy who had injured her, and who had met it with utterly disarming rectitude; this woman to whom duty was dearer than love,--she had changed the face of the world and the meaning of life for him. He had many times believed a lie, and not seldom had he worshipped a sham; but he has detected the one and exposed the other, and gone on his way not much the worse for the delusion, and a good deal wiser for the experience. Life had, however, never brought him anything like this before, and he knew it never would again. He should never love, he could never love, any other woman than this peerless one who could never be his, from whom her own mandate--he knew its power and unchangeableness--had severed him, whom he must leave in the grasp of sorrow and perplexity. He mused long and painfully over the interview of the preceding day, and he asked himself how it was that, dear as she had been to him, early as he had ceased to struggle against her influence, he had never understood the strength, the dignity, the perfect rectitude of her character before. It never occurred to Sir Laurence that he had not looked for these qualities; that he had never studied her disposition but in the most superficial way; that his love for her was founded upon no fine theory whatsoever; that it had sprung up partly in admiration of her exceeding beauty, partly in chivalrous compassion for her disastrous situation, and found its remaining constituent in a hearty contempt and abhorrence of Sir Charles Mitford. In short, Sir Laurence did not understand that he had done just as other people do,--fallen in love with a woman first, and found out what sort of woman she really was afterwards.