It is only when our feelings are imaginary that we analyse them. When the real thing comes--the thing that only does come to a few of us--we can only feel it, and there is no thought of analysis. Moreover, the action is purely involuntary. We feel strange things--such things as murder--and we cannot help feeling it. We may cringe and shrink; we may toss in our beds when we wake up with such thoughts living, moving, having their being in our brains--but we cannot toss them off. The very attempt to do so is a realisation, and from consciousness we spring to knowledge. We know that in our hearts we are thieves, murderers, slanderers; we know that if we read of such thoughts in a novel we should hold the thinker in all horror; but we are distinctly conscious all the time that these thoughts are our own. This is just the difference existing between artificial feelings and real: the one bears analysis, the other cannot. Hilda Carew could not have defined her feelings on the evening of the arrival of Mr. Bodery and the Vicomte d'Audierne. She was conscious of the little facts of everyday existence. She dressed for dinner with singular care; during that repast she talked and laughed much as usual, but all the while she felt like any one in all the world but Hilda Carew. At certain moments she wondered with a throb of apprehension whether the difference which was so glaringly patent to herself could possibly be hidden from others. She caught strange inflections in her own voice which she knew had never been there before--her own laughter was a new thing to her. And yet she went on through dinner and until bedtime, acting this strange part without break, without fault--a part which had never been rehearsed and never learnt: a part which was utterly artificial and yet totally without art, for it came naturally. And through it all she feared the Vicomte d'Audierne. Mr. Bodery counted for nothing. He made a very good dinner, was genial and even witty in a manner befitting his years and station. Mrs. Carew was fully engaged with her guests, and Molly was on lively terms with the Vicomte; while Sidney, old Sidney--no one counted him. It was only the Vicomte who paused at intervals during his frugal meal, and looked across the table towards the young girl with those deep, impenetrable eyes--shadowless, gleamless, like velvet. When bedtime at length arrived, she was quite glad to get away from that kind, unobtrusive scrutiny of which she alone was aware. She went to her room, and sitting wearily on the bed she realised for the first time in her life the incapacity to think. It is a realisation which usually comes but once or twice in a lifetime, and we are therefore unable to get accustomed to it. She was conscious of intense pressure within her brain, of a hopeless weight upon her heart, but she could define neither. She rose at length, and mechanically went to bed like one in a trance. In the same way she fell asleep.