When once Royce had acquired the sense of invisibility, he put no curb on his poor and humble cravings to see her, to hear the sound of her voice albeit she spoke only to others. Every day found him on the mountaineers’ bench at the bowling-alley, sometimes alone, sometimes in grotesque company, the ridicule, he knew, of the young and thoughtless; and he had no care if he were ridiculed too. Sometimes she came, and he was drearily happy. Frequently she was absent, and in dull despair he sat and dreamed of her till the game was done. He grew to love the inanimate things she touched, the dress she wore; he even loved best that which she wore most often, and his heart lightened whenever he recognized it, as if the sight of it were some boon of fate, and their common preference for it a bond of sympathy. Once she came in late from a walk in the woods, wearing white, with a purple cluster of the wild verbena at her bosom. There was a blossom lying upon the floor after the people were all gone. He saw it as it slipped down, and he waited, and then, in the absolute solitude, with a furtive gesture he picked it up, and after that he always wore it, folded in a bit of paper, over his heart. In the midst of this absorbing emotion Lucien Royce did not feel the pangs of supplantation till the fact had been repeatedly driven home. When, returning from New Helvetia, he would find Jack Ormsby sitting on the steps of the cabin porch, talking to Euphemia, he welcomed as a relief the opportunity to betake himself and his bitter brooding thoughts down to the bank of the river, where he was wont to walk to and fro under the white stars, heedless of the joyous voices floating down to him, deaf to all save the inflections of a voice in his memory. He began gradually to note with a dull surprise Euphemia’s scant, overlooking glance when her eyes must needs turn toward him; her indifferent manner,--even averse, it might seem; her disaffected languor save when Jack Ormsby’s shadow fell athwart the door. In some sort Royce had grown obtuse to all except the sentiment that enthralled him. Under normal circumstances he would have detected instantly the flimsy pretense with which she sought to stimulate his jealousy, to restore his allegiance, to sustain her pride. She had not dreamed that her hold upon his heart, gained only by reason of his loneliness and despair and the distastefulness of his surroundings, had slackened the instant a deep and real love took possession of him. She had not divined this hopeless, silent love--from afar, from infinite lengths of despair!--for another. She only knew that somehow he had grown oblivious of her, and was much absent from her. This touched her pride, her fatal pride! And thus she played off Jack Ormsby against him as best she might, and held her head very high.