When he reached the house where Minola lived, the aspect of the place was just such as, if he had been a lover, he might have expected or desired to find. The house was all in darkness save for one window. There was a looking-glass in that window, making it plain to the least observant of human creatures that it must be the window of a bedroom. How could a lover doubt that that must be the window of the room which was hers, and that she then watched the stars of midnight, and that she thought of love, and that her soul was, as Jean Paul puts it, in the blue ether? For the moment Victor Heron found himself wishing that he were a lover--were the lover of whom the lady, fancy-fixed in that one lighted room, might be thinking. But if it were Minola's room, he thought, she certainly had not him or any memory of him in her mind. It was a clear, soft midnight, and the moon that shone on the near roof of the British Museum seemed as poetic and as sad as though it fell on the ruins of the Parthenon. No practice in colonial administration can wholly squeeze the poetic and the romantic out of the breast of a young man of Heron's time of life. As he stood there his grievance seemed as far off as the moon herself, but not by any means so poetic and beautiful. He paced up and down, feeling very young and odd, and unlike his usual self. He was happy in a queer, boyish way that had a certain shamefaced sensation about it, as when a youth for the first time drinks suddenly of some sparkling wine, and feels his brain and senses all aflame with delicious ecstasy, and is afraid of the feeling although he delights in it.