Love is like inspiration; it is not to be commanded, bought, or sold, not even given when deserved. The most unworthy are often most favoured, and the faithful suppliants at the capricious god’s gates often go empty away. You may go “far from the madding crowd,” and hide yourself in the desert. You may bury yourself in a cave in the Thebaid, as the hermits of Egypt did, and you will be hit; while you might have been unscathed in the assemblies of Beauty. Ah, the lives of the Thaumaturgists tell us nothing about all this! Like the testimonials to the quack medicines, we know all about the cures, but what about the failures? Do you think St. Simeon Stylites, atop of his pillar, was out of reach of that bow? Not he! Is he not an ungrateful archer? Does he not come creeping to our doors with wet wings and cold body, craving our warmth and food, and then transfix us? That is just his way, the rogue. “All is fair in love and war,” he cries; and so he transfixed our hero, and wonderful to relate on this occasion benevolently hit our heroine too—double violence. He is not always in this humour. That is the worst of it! When maid and swain are wounded at once, Romeo and Juliet like, where is the harm, though poison and the tomb follow with winged feet? To have loved so is worth the cost. The mischief of it is, when one truly loves, and the other thinks perhaps she loves, and is not hit at all. That is just where all the misery comes, for you can’t catch love like the cholera, by frightening yourself into it. You must have the true vaccine or you won’t get the vesicle. Is not that a horrible simile? Does Cupid poison his darts, and is it a disease he produces after all, and is he a doctor? Hush! The euphemism for the Erinnyes was Eumenides, remember. Do not let us draw their attention by needless plain speaking. So when Mildred had departed from Granada, and Elsworth was left alone and had time to examine his hurt, he found it was deep. Things were not the same to him as before that day when he rushed out to drive away the rude children who were annoying her. “Ah, blessed children,” he would often say, “you opened heaven to me!” “O love, my love! if I no more should see Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee, Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,— How then should sound upon Life’s darkening slope The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, The wind of Death’s imperishable wing?” Here in this out-of-the-way corner of civilization, then, he had been unearthed, and it was no longer possible to shut himself from the observation of his friends and relatives; he would soon have to return to society and explain his conduct.