He was not averse to this solitude. His affections for Miss Tobit had lately warmed into a less indifferent kindliness, and he began to feel a gnawing anxiety lest the pretty Scotch woman thought less of him--in the way lovers like--than she did of her cousin, the handsome and obnoxiously unconcerned Thomsen. Thomsen knew exactly Leacraft’s feelings, and regarded them with unconcealed forbearance, and--what was more provoking--with a frank condescension of sympathy. And yet the men had become good friends; they had talked long and seriously, with all the elements of critical guidance they could summon, about the strange reversal or revolution in the nation’s affairs. But at these moments they were in an impersonal frame of contact, and the personal exigencies which later crept between them, were all absent. Leacraft’s intellectual weight easily made itself felt in these discussions, and Thomsen, with cordial alacrity, assumed the obedient position of audience and pupil. As Leacraft was driven eastward in the swinging vehicle, he flung himself against its cushions, and again thought of the monstrous and incredible metamorphosis in the fortunes of his people. The vigorous life of ten centuries, with all its memories, the heaped up riches of its achievements, the splendid literary legacy of the past, with its art, its lineaments of beauty, its dusky shadows, the solicitous charm of its contrasted periods of history, the deep encrustation, nay, rather, the unfathomable deposits of character, and accomplishment which overlaid the Kingdom of England, and, in this city of London, the beating heart of its vast interests, thickly choked each avenue and current of its life--to abandon all this at the summons of a temperatural caprice, at the tempestuous whim of an earthquake, before the blind violence of frost and snow and ice, was the most unendurable of humiliations! It bit too deeply at the generalized assumption of the whole world, that man ruled the earth; it soured the contentment of his avid vanity, and to the Englishman it assailed the hitherto impregnable fortress of his heroic conceit. And yet--the old dream of a greater England arose, as it had arisen a hundred times before, in all these troubling and disconcerting months--an England leaping forward, as an exultant youth, bearing in his hands the trophies of new and brighter conquests, flushed under changed environments, with the inspiration of new ambitions, and new powers of creation, issuing into a greater chapter of human growth than had ever before been conceived or written.