It was not till early in the second spring of my idyll that the clouds began to darken, and my conscience to stir uneasily in those gloomy last hours before the final waking. Many things had contributed to this state, some cardinal, but most, no doubt, indifferent--mere little tributary streams which had come to swell the volume of my disenchantment. Misunderstanding, alas! does not walk to challenge us on the highway. It spies from behind hedges, and listens at keyholes; and when at length its tally of grievances is made, we wonder at the weight of the evidence it has accumulated. Late in the previous year I had been very ill. During the worst of my disorder an unconscionable old hag, some withered afreet of the forest, who was in the secret of our retreat, had been brought in to attend me. She disappeared soon, thank God, in a whisk of sulphur; and thereafter George nursed me devotedly. But, strangely enough, as I grew convalescent I developed an odd impatience of him, which rose by degrees to a real intolerance and dislike. That feeling abated as I grew strong, but never to such degree as to make us again quite the friends we had been. He made some study to propitiate me, even to the extent of renouncing those ridiculous principles of “Nature,” which he had affected to exchange for the whole sum of social accommodations. It was a relief, though an aggravation, to have him refine himself again out of a savage, since I no longer could find the entertainment I once had in the dear _poseur_. Orson, in truth, was never so little attractive as when, for the sake of tired love’s favour, he confessed his ruggedness a humbug. His recantation, though welcome enough in one way, only disillusioned me in another. So long as he had been consistent, he was absolute; now his weakness had made me so. I remembered the times when I had pleaded with him, and had found him only more covetable in his inaccessibility to my arguments. “We can’t return to Nature, in the sense of rudeness,” I had often said to him, “any more than we can recover our childhood. We have grown out of it, and there’s an end. A man playing the child is only sorry make-believe; or, if it isn’t, the man’s an idiot. Nature herself, you see, isn’t stationary: she’s always refining on her first conceptions.” “What!” he would protest, grumbling; “is all that hypocrisy of ‘breeding,’ that high _goût_, which is so fastidious in its appetite for crawling meats, and rotten policies, and bruised virtues, Nature?” “Yes, to be sure,” I would answer: “’tis _human_ nature--the fruits of her desire to hasten her social apotheosis by a union with the sons of God.” “Ay,” would growl my Timon--“the fruits of incontinence.”