The next morning I slipped circumspectly into Traxelby church, just before the sermon. If you hold religion sacred and dear (as I feel sure you do), it may shock you to know that I looked at you through the pillars of the Langley monument for a quarter of an hour. But my thoughts were not sacrilegious. Although I thanked God for your beauty (and how beautiful you were that morning!), I worshipped God most because He had created your soul, your very self. As I watched you, I knew that you alone in all the world could charm away my spirit’s restlessness and hunger--the hunger and the restlessness which I had hidden even from my own self. I recalled my loveless life; my boyhood spent among tutors and schoolmasters; my youth and early manhood at two schools and at three universities in three different countries; my last year--the year before I came back to the Towers--spent on cosmopolitan steamships and in unhomely hotels. I thought of the only women I have ever known well--my hard and shallow cousins, who are handsome and elegant only with the sort of handsomeness and elegance that ten thousand other hard and shallow women share with them. Then I looked at you again, and wanted to come home to you as a bird flies home to his nest. As I walked back from church, I knew that my ignoble chagrin had melted and vanished at the second vision of you. Instead of exclaiming against Fate for placing you, as the word goes, "below me," I rejoiced that there was a sacrifice to be made--a way of proving to you that I was moved by Love alone. I laughed at myself for having wished you had been Miss Langley! Perhaps I am supersensitive, ultradelicate. But I felt, on that Sunday morning, that if you had been Miss Langley, I might have shrunk from the wooing. The obviousness, the hard-headed, practical common sense of such a match would have put me off it. When every consideration of worldly suitability pointed to a joining of her name and lands and interests with mine, how could I have gone to Miss Langley on a simple errand of Love? I know of one gossip who had already linked her with me. How I should have cursed this rank of mine, which I never wanted, and this wealth of mine, which I never earned, if they had robbed me of the power to convince a woman of my love, and to woo her for herself alone!