Geoffrey Wornock went back to Discombe, and his mother read failure and mortification in his gloomy countenance; but he vouchsafed no confidence. He was not sullen or unkind. He lived; and that was about as much as could be said of him. The fiddles, which were to him as cherished friends, lay mute in their cases. He seemed to regard that spacious music-room with its lofty ceiling and noble capacity for sound, as the captive lion regards his cage--a place in which to roam about, and pace to and fro, restless, miserable, unsatisfied. He did not complain, and his mother dared not attempt to console. Once she pressed his hand and whispered "patience;" but he only shook his head fretfully, and walked out of the room. "Patience! yes," he muttered to himself. "I could be patient, as patient as Jacob when he waited for Rachel--if I were sure she loved me. But I have begun to doubt even that. Oh, if she knew what love meant, she would have rushed into my arms. She would have swooned upon my breast in the shock of that meeting; but she sat prim and quiet, only a little pale and tearful, while I was shaken by a tempest of passion. She is capable of no more than a schoolgirl's love--held in check by the pettiest restraints of good manners and the world's opinion--and she has hardly decided whether that feeble flame burns for me or for Allan." And then he began to preach to himself the sermon which almost every slighted swain has preached since the world began. What was this woman that he should die of heartache for her? Was she so much fairer than other women whom he might have for the wooing? No, again and again, no. He could conjure fairer faces out of the past--faces he had gazed at and praised, and which had left him cold. She was not as handsome as Miss Simpson, at Simla, last year--that Miss Simpson who had thrown herself at his head--or as Miss Brown at Naini Tal, General Brown's daughter, who looked liked a houri, and who waltzed like a thing of air, imparting buoyancy and grace to the lumpiest of partners. He had not cared a straw for Miss Brown, even although the General had hinted to him, in the after-dinner freedom of the mess-room, that Miss Brown had an exalted opinion of him. No, he had cared for neither of these girls, though either might have been his for the asking. Perhaps that was why he did not care. He was madly in love with Suzette, whom he had known only as another man's betrothed. Suzette represented the unattainable; and for Suzette he could die.