She was drowning, she held out her hands.
To whom, but to him upon the bank? How should he know what shadow stood
behind him, with praise in his dim eyes for a "dear obsequious head"?
Playing deputy to Senhouse, little as he guessed it, he devoted himself to
bracing her for the match, having made up his mind that there was no other
way of making her happiness his own. His mistress she might be, his wife
never. As he read her, she would keep the letter of the law--since the law
required it of her. The rest, he flattered himself, might be left to time
and him. His present aim was to interest and stimulate her, without
alarming.
He counted greatly upon some sudden emotional stimulus, which would cause
her to fall to him; and one came, though it had no such effect.
The opera of _Tristan and Isolde,_ to which she was taken by Lady Maria--
where she sat in his box, by his side, absorbed in the most sensuous
expression of the love-malady that has ever tormented its way out of a
poet's heart--had been a real test of his restraint. He had not once met
her eyes--though hers, craving sympathy at any hand, had sought his often;
he had not once permitted himself to gaze upon her beauty, though it was
her beauty, so carven, so purely Greek, which had drawn him to her from
the first.
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