again, for all his philosophy, he was occasionally guilty of adding to
the sum of his own pain by deliberately indulging in it. There were
evenings when he fell on weakness and allowed himself to go over the
fields at dark to Paradise, where he would stand at the point in the
hedge whence he had been wont to watch her light. One evening there was
a light in her window, and his heart had thudded in his chest so that he
could have heard it had he been occupied in anything but clutching the
hedge with both hands and staring, half-expecting a miracle to happen
and her form to be shadowed on the blind at any moment. Sometimes, too,
as he lay in his bed after a hard day's work and sleep would have come
to him had he let it, he would start imagining, as he had been wont to
do when a little boy. Only now it was not mere cloudy, impossible dreams
of renown, of rescuing the whole family from a burning house, that
filled his mind, but reconstructions of the time with Blanche.... If he
had said this or that, something different from what he had said; if
only, if only.... And if she were to come back, how he would forget all
he had said about it being impossible to go on as they were in
uncertainty--how willingly would he catch at any excuse for trying it
all over again. He would plan that too, till sometimes his vivid
imaginings would for a few moments almost deceive himself, and he would
realise, with a pang whose sharpness turned him sick and banished sleep,
that it was all only the pretence of a child.

Nevertheless, he did not succumb to the temptation to write to her,
probably because in his inmost heart he knew too well that if she wanted
him she would write--on some other excuse. He had been in a curious way
clear-sighted about her from the first; he had always acknowledged that
strain of insincerity, but he had fallen into the error of believing
that underneath all those shifting sands there was at last bedrock and
that it was his hand which was to discover it. He now knew that it was