There was on her this night an infinite gentleness, a gracious sweetness, often tinged with sadness, though often bright, brilliant, and illumined with all the grace of talent. But at the same time there was the sovereignty which, in her solitude, guarded her as an empress is guarded in a Court, which made her as secure from words of warmer tinge than what she chose to hear, as she was carelessly disdainful of the precise customs of the world. He felt that she forbade him to approach her with any whisper of love; he knew that to take advantage of his admission to her solitude, to give any utterance to the passion in him, would be to be banished from it then and for ever. He felt this though she never spoke, never hinted it; and even while the restriction galled and stung him most, he most revered her for it, he most honoured and adored in her the holiness of his ideal.
There was a difference in her from the evening before; while her gaiety was less, the darker shadow was also far less upon her. She had scarcely touched the wines, and of play she did not speak; it might be but the "hope which out of its own self creates the thing it longs for," but he could have believed that for the few hours of the present she had resigned herself to happiness—happiness in
