Chapter 13

"Your--Grace!"

"Come with me, Gerald, to Dunstan's Wolde," said my lord, as they sat
together that night in his town-house. "I would have your company if
you will give it me until you rejoin Marlborough. I am lonely in these
days."

His lordship did not look his usual self, seeming, Roxholm thought,
worn and sometimes abstracted. He was most kind and affectionate, and
there was in his manner a paternal tenderness and sympathy which the
young man was deeply touched by. If it had been possible for him to
have spoken to any living being of the singular mental disturbance he
had felt beginning in him of late, he could have confessed it to Lord
Dunstanwolde. But nature had created in him a tendency to silence and
reserve where his own feelings were concerned. As to most human beings
there is a consolation in pouring forth the innermost secret thoughts
at times, to him there was support in the knowledge that he held all
within his own breast and could reflect upon his problems in sacred
privacy. At this period, indeed, his feelings were such as he could
scarcely have described to any one. He was merely conscious of a sort
of unrest and of being far from comprehending his own emotions. They
were, indeed, scarcely definite enough to be called emotions, but only
seemed shadows hovering about him and causing him vaguely to wonder at
their existence. He was neither elated nor depressed, but found himself
confronting fancies he had not confronted before, and at times
regarding the course of events with something of the feeling of a
fatalist. There was a thing it seemed from which he could not escape,
yet in his deepest being was aware that he would have preferred to
avoid it. No man wishes to encounter unhappiness; he was conscious
remotely that this preference for avoidance arose from a vaguely
defined knowledge that in one direction there lay possibilities of
harsh suffering and pain.

"'Tis a strange thing," he said to himself, "how I seem forbid by Fate
to avoid the path of this strange wild creature. My Lord Marlborough
brings her up to me at his quarters, I leave them; and going to my own,
meet with Tantillion and his letter; I enter a coffee-house and hear
wild talk of her; I go to my own house and my mother paints a picture
of her which stirs my very depths; I walk in the streets of London and
am dragged aside to find myself gazing at her portrait; I leave it,
and meet my Lord Dunstanwolde, who prays me to go to Warwickshire,
where I shall be within a few miles of her and may encounter her any
hour. What will come next?"

That which came next was not unlike what had gone before. On their
journey to Warwickshire my Lord Dunstanwolde did not