As one wakes from a fevered dream Ellinor awoke from her brief madness. Her father’s placid tones, the everyday obvious explanation fell upon her heart like drops of cold water. But the reaction was scarcely one of relief. How was it possible that she, Ellinor Marvel, the woman of many experiences, of the cool brain and the strong heart, should have yielded to this degrading folly, this futile jealousy? What had she done! She shivered as a rapid sequence of thought forced its logic upon her unwilling mind. She had feared that the touch of some woman out of his past should reach David now, at the very moment when a lover’s heart was opening to her in his bosom. Behold! she had herself delivered him over to the one woman of all others she had most reason to dread—the woman who, out of her own outrage upon him had acquired the most influence over his life. It seemed to Ellinor as if she herself who had so laboured to call him to the present and lure him with hopes of a brighter future, had now handed him back to the slavery of the past. The seal cracked under his fingers. “Ah, no,” she cried, now springing forward on the new impulse. “No, no, David, do not read it! Send it back, like the others!” He flung on her a single glance. “It is too late,” he said, “the seal is broken.” “Ah, me,” cried Ellinor. “And we were so happy!” She remembered Margery’s sleek face as it had peered at her in the shadows of the passage: “Will you be good enough to hand this letter yourself to my master?” Margery had known that from her hand he would take it. Margery had a devil’s instinct of the folly of men and women. CHAPTER VI THE PERFECT ROSE, DROOPING Such is the fond illusion of my heart, Such pictures would I at that time have made; And seen the soul of truth in every part, A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed. So once it would have been—’tis so no more: I have submitted to a new control, A power is gone which nothing can restore.... —WORDSWORTH (_Elegiacs_). Sir David sat down upon the parapet, shifted the lantern and began to read. Ellinor watched him, the tumultuous beating of her heart gradually sinking down to a dull languor. Master Simon was pacing the platform, now conning over some chemical formula to himself, now pausing to gaze upon the stars with a good humoured sneer upon the futility of astronomy in general and the absurdity of Sir David’s in particular. A bat came and flapped with noiseless wings round the lantern and was lost again in the darkness of the surrounding deeps. It seemed to Ellinor a heavy space of time, and still David sat with a contracted brow, motionless, staring at the open sheet in his hand. At length he raised his head. His eyes sought, not herself, but the comrade of his long years of solitude. “Cousin Simon!”