“I was afraid--you would feel,” faltered Adrian. “Is that what’s the matter with you? You look awfully muffish.” “Well,--as you loved her once,--I thought----” “That was a case of mistaken identity,” said Randal. “Can’t you realize that it is just because she _could_ prefer another man; that she could think a thought of change; that her plighted faith could be broken; that her love,--or what we called love,--could take unto itself wings and fly away; that she was only an illusion, a delusion, a snare. I never loved the woman she is.” “She is very beautiful,” hesitated Adrian. “When I thought her mind and heart matched her face she seemed beautiful to me, too,” said Randal. “You will think so still.” “Kid, you know nothing about love. A man truly in love may have been attracted by beauty, but it is not that which holds him. It is a unity of soul; he finds a complement of mind; he has a sense of sympathy and, through thick and thin, a partisan, constant faith in a reciprocal heart. He gets used to the prettiest face and it makes little impression on him,--just as he wouldn’t notice, after a time, a fine costume. She is nothing that I imagined. She is not now, and she never was the ideal I loved. I don’t regret her. Don’t grieve for me, little boy. And now will you be so kind as to take those paws off my neck,--you are half strangling me with your fraternal anxiety. Behold, I will smite you under the fifth rib.” There was once more a brief, boyish scuffle. Then the two turned and came walking decorously back to the group on the portico. The exterior aspect of the old ruin had an added majesty by daylight, despite the more obvious injuries of wreckage. Its fine proportions, the blended elegance and stateliness of its design, the richness even in the restraint of its ornamentation, all showed with telling effect, apart from the wild work within of the marauders. These details the rude usage it had received could not affect. It might have stood as an imposing architectural example of a princely residence of the date of its erection, and it was impossible to gaze upon it with a sense of possessing it, and feel no glow of gratulation. “Why, the item of glass alone would be a corker,” a practical man was saying, walking backward down the stone pavement and surveying the great black gaps of the shattered windows.