CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE POWER THAT MADE BOY AND GIRL.'

NEVER were there more miserable days than those which Clement Hope was now passing. He suffered intensely, and all the more because it seemed to him that he had no right to complain. His idle and transient passion for Melissa, that unreal boyish affectation of love, had been foolishly cherished by him, and ostentatiously exhibited and proclaimed after the fashion of youth, when it is pleased to fancy itself in love, and is proud of its own sham and self-delusion. He hated to think of this now. He looked back with shame and anger upon his former rhapsodies, and ravings, and

attitudinisings as the hopeless lover of poor Melissa. Such folly, he felt, took away from him now all right to complain. Why should Geraldine think for a moment of one like him, whom she had seen only the other day apparently steeped in love for another girl, a girl far beneath her own level in intellect and in heart, and how could she now be expected to regard him in any serious light? She could but laugh at him and despise him. Only for his colonisation scheme and its incessant demands and details, Clement sometimes felt as if his life could not go on; as if he must have ended all the difficulty by going out of his senses. The nights above all were trying to him. He came home late and tired to the lonely house looking on the dismal canal, and he could not sleep. He mounted the little observatory on the roof, and looked abroad over the trees and grass of the park, and saw the sky reddened by the lights of the

great city. He outwatched the bear and the sun of the sleepless,' the 'melancholy star,' and only fell into a fitful sleep at last when morning had come and

began to be alive again.

the roads and streets Sometimes he went

out before the dawn, and wandered about the roads, and climbed a little hill in the neighbourhood, from which he had a confused: view of London shining somewhere in the near distance, like a mass of glowworms in a hollow. He hated the lonely ghostly house, and yet he would not leave it to live anywhere else. He would not leave it even for a night. He felt a kind of savage self-torturing pleasure in condemning himself to its loneliness, and its shadows and its memories. Day and night the one feeling possessed him. He had found: out his love too late, and had found out at the same time that he was not worthy of such a love.

Sometimes he raged at Geraldine, and told

himself that she was marrying only for money, for a home, for position, that she was throwing away her youth and her beauty and her intellect on a man old enough to be her father, selling herself, as many another girl was doing, for mere worldly advantage. Such a thought filling him for the time with an angry feeling against the girl gave him the momentary courage of resentment. But he soon found that courage bought at such a cost is not worth having even to a disappointed lover. It is only like the courage supplied by the maddening stimulus of some strong drink. It is factitious and unwholesome, and leaves its dismal hours of reaction and depression, its lonely wasting heartache, instead of the headache which the other excitement bequeaths in dying. And, besides, Clement was not in his right mind when he allowed such a thought to possess him, even for a moment. He knew this. He never could believe any

thing evil of Geraldine.

Let her motive be

what it would, it must be a good one and worthy of her. He could only suppose that she either did love Captain Marion-after all such things had happened-or that she felt she could care for no one else in the sense of deepest love, and was therefore willing to marry a man for whom she had a sincere respect and affection. Anyhow it was all the same to Clement. She was lost to him. She never could even know how truly he loved her, and how fully he appreciated her. That bitter immemorial remonstrance with fate which the disappointed lover makes, if she could only know''if she could only understand all' that remonstrance was always in Clement's heart, if not on his lips. He himself had rendered this impossible. She never could know him as he really was, never could understand that his love for her was deep and real, and even in his sufferings he could not