He took up his hat and after very few more words left the office, on all points less satisfied than when he entered it. He hated humbug, and this foreign Countess’s playing with him, even if it arose from nothing but a woman’s love of little mysteries, was exceedingly distasteful to him. He had acted in the promptest and most upright way towards Nouna, such as might have convinced any reasonable person of his integrity, yet in no respect had he met with corresponding frankness on her side. If he had been told before of the young girl’s possibly brilliant prospects, it would have changed many things for him; now that the suggestion was suddenly sprung upon him late in the day, he found that he could not adjust himself to the notion of Nouna rich, distracted in the first flush of the honeymoon by the startling news that she was a wealthy woman, with a host of luxurious pleasures at her command outside such simpler, more domestic happiness as her husband could give her. And he resolved that, as she did not know of the sensational prospect that might open before her, he would himself say nothing about it, but would wait until the will case was tried, and the matter finally settled in one way or the other. George Lauriston, having held himself till now rather markedly aloof from the influence of feminine fascination, was now expiating his neglect in daily tightening bondage at the feet of the most irresistible little tyrant that ever captivated a man’s senses and wormed her way into his heart, none the less that he saw daily with increasing clearness how much more he was giving her than she was giving, or perhaps could give, to him. George was puzzled and disappointed. Arguing from his personal experience, in which the ecstatic dreams and timid caresses of the lover had been but a weak prelude to the ardent and demonstrative tenderness of the young husband, he had taken it for granted that those pretty, capricious outbursts of girlish passion, which had charmed him so much by their piquant unusualness, would develop under the sunshine of happy matrimony into a rich growth of steady affection, coloured by the tropical glow which seemed to belong to her individuality, and cherished and fed by his own devotion. It almost seemed sometimes as if marriage had had the effect of checking her spontaneous effusiveness, as if she was rather afraid of the violent demonstrations which any encouragement would bring down upon her. Now George, at three-and-twenty, could scarcely be expected to be much of a philosopher; and finding in his own case that true love was indeed all-absorbing, he saw no reason for doubting the common belief that true love must always be so. Only at a much later stage of experience does one understand that into that vaguely described state of being “in love” enter many questions of race, complexion, age, sex, and circumstances, which produce as many varieties of that condition as there are men and women who pass through it.