For a while, desperate, still mutinous, the man’s torn soul fought out its tragedy of renunciation. And at last impulsively surrendered. With bowed head, he spoke the words: “You have a noble mind, sir. If you will not retaliate on me as you might, death is always somewhere waiting for the soldier. I will go do what I may to seek an honourable one. And so heaven forgive me and requite your Highness!” He took the gracious young hand in his, put his lips to it, and, turning, left the room, walking with blinded eyes and upright head, like a prisoner who passes from the dock to the condemned cell. CHAPTER XIX. “MARIANA” The real tragedy of separation is not for the banished lover; it is for the desolate home-keeper, who knows no distractions of change and movement to solace her aching heart. He, at least, has his freedom, his new interests; she, none but the old, grown now so flat and unprofitable since the glorifying light was once flashed upon them and withdrawn. How darker than darkness looks a room when the lamp is blown out; how stale and charmless seems life the morning after the play; how remote from the witching darling of last night’s masque appears this love-sick Chloe, yawning biliously over her untouched breakfast plate! Perhaps Strephon this morning also looks a little “off colour” and feels a little sick; but he has the imperative duties of office to call him to a sane resumption of life’s prose, and no doubt by lunch time he has earned himself a vigorous appetite, no less hearty for the sentiment which has intervened between his chop of yesterday and his curried prawns of to-day. But, for poor stay-at-home Chloe, some zest has gone for ever from the old placid satisfactions; she cannot recover at their past valuation the humdrum routine of things; she has seen the commonplace transformed, and henceforth life to her, to be life, must reveal itself on a higher plane. So she still toys with her food at luncheon, and again at dinner, and sighs over the insufferable dreariness and monotony of that social existence which once made her full content.