"He will never be sure what she thinks of him, or what she wishes him to think of her, though she will have no caprices, and will always treat him beautifully, and the uncertainty will make him enjoy himself more than ever." "Such a state of bliss," said the colonel, "is indeed greatly to be envied." He was always conscious of a rather dreary sense of bewilderment when he heard himself giving voice in his deep tones to such small change as the above remark. Under such circumstances there was suggested to him the idea that for the moment he had changed places with some more luckily facile creature and represented him but awkwardly. And yet, of late, he had found himself gradually bereft of all other conversational resource. Since the New Year's day, when Bertha had called his attention to the weather, he had seen in her no vestige of what had so moved him in the brief summer holiday in which she had seemed to forget to arm herself against him. It appeared that his place was fixed for him, and that nothing remained but to occupy it with as good a grace as possible. But he knew he had not borne it well at the outset. It was but nature that he should have borne it ill, and have made some effort at least to understand the meaning of the change in her. "All this goes for nothing," he had said to her; but it had not gone for nothing, after all. A man who loves a woman with the whole force of his being, whether it is happily or unhappily, is not a well-regulated creature wholly under his own control. His imagination will play him bitter tricks and taunt him many an hour, both in the bright day and in the dead watches of the night, when he wakens to face his misery alone. He will see things as they are not, and be haunted by phantoms whose vague outlines torture him, while he knows their unreality. "It is not true," he will say. "It cannot be--and yet if it should be--though it is not." A word, a smile, the simplest glance or tone, will distort themselves until their very slightness seems the most damning proof. But that he saw his own folly and danger, there were times on those first days when Tredennis might have been betrayed by his fierce sense of injury into mistakes which it would have been impossible for him to retrieve by any after effort. But even in the moments of his greatest weakness he refused to trifle with himself. On the night of the New Year's day when Bertha and Agnes had sat together, he had kept a vigil too. The occupant of the room below his had heard him walking to and fro, and had laid his restlessness to a great number of New Year's calls instead of to a guilty conscience. But the colonel had been less lenient with himself, and had fought a desperate battle in the silent hours.