“I envy you. Since that is so, help me--of your charity!--to understand myself.” “Then understand yourself for an impudent, fleering coxcomb,” she flung at him, and turned to leave him. “That is not explanation,” said Mr. Caryll thoughtfully. “It is mere abuse.” “What else do you deserve?” she asked him over her shoulder. “That you should have dared!” she withered him. “To love you quite so suddenly?” he inquired, and misquoted: “'Whoever loved at all, that loved not at first sight?' Hortensia!” “You have not the right to my name, sir.” “Yet I offer you the right to mine,” he answered, with humble reproach. “You shall be punished,” she promised him, and in high dudgeon left him. “Punished? Oh, cruel! Can you then be-- “'Unsoft to him who's smooth to thee? Tigers and bears, I've heard some say, For proffered love will love repay.”' But she was gone. He looked up at the moon, and took it into his confidence to reproach it. “'Twas your white face beglamored me,” he told it aloud. “See, how execrable a beginning I've made, and, therefore, how excellent!” And he laughed, but entirely without mirth. He remained pacing in the moonlight, very thoughtful, and, for once, it seemed, not at all amused. His life appeared to be tangling itself beyond unravelling, and his vaunted habit of laughter scarce served at present to show him the way out. CHAPTER VI. HORTENSIA'S RETURN Mr. Caryll needs explaining as he walks there in the moonlight; that is, if we are at all to understand him--a matter by no means easy, considering that he has confessed he did not understand himself. Did ever man make a sincere declaration of sudden passion as flippantly as he had done, or in terms-better calculated to alienate the regard he sought to win? Did ever man choose his time with less discrimination, or his words with less discretion? Assuredly not. To suppose that Mr. Caryll was unaware of this, would be to suppose him a fool, and that he most certainly was not. His mood was extremely complex; its analysis, I fear, may baffle us. It must have seemed to you--as it certainly seemed to Mistress Winthrop--that he made a mock of her; that in truth he was the impudent, fleering coxcomb she pronounced him, and nothing more. Not so. Mock he most certainly did; but his mockery was all aimed to strike himself on the recoil--himself and the sentiments which had sprung to being in his soul, and to which--nameless as he was, pledged as he was to a task that would most likely involve his ruin--he conceived that he had no right. He gave expression to his feelings, yet chose for them the expression best calculated to render them barren of all consequence where Mistress Winthrop was concerned. Where another would have hidden those emotions, Mr. Caryll elected to flaunt them half-derisively, that Hortensia might trample them under foot in sheer disgust.