Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/213

 together, hand in hand, they would have laboured in God's service. At least so it seemed to him now.

Then had come an enforced separation; and later, after a prolonged, unaccountable delay, a letter from her explaining, in trite, discursive phrases, how it could never be—it was a mistake—she had not known her own mind—now she could see things clearer—she hoped he would forgive and forget her.

A wild determination to go at once to her, to plead with her, gripped him; but for three days he was helpless, bound fast by parish duties. And when at last he found himself free, he had already begun to perceive the hopelessness of such an errand, and, with crushed and dogged despair, to accept his fate as irrevocable.

In his boyhood—at the local grammar-school, where his ugliness had made him the butt of his class, and later, at an insignificant Oxford college, where, to spare his father, whose glebe was at the time untenanted, he had set himself grimly to live on an impossibly slender allowance—at every turn of his life, he had found himself at a disadvantage with his fellows. Thus he had suffered much, dumbly—meekly many would have said—without a sign of resentment, or desire for retaliation. But all the while, in his tenacious, long-suffering way, he was stubbornly inuring himself to an acceptance of his own disqualifications. And so, once rudely awakened from his dream of love, he wondered with heavy curiosity at his faith in its glamorous reality, and, remembering the tenour of his life, suffered bitterly like a man befooled by his own conceit.

Some months after the shattering of his romance, the rumour reached him that James Fulton, a prosperous solicitor in the town, was courting her. The thing was impossible, a piece of idle gossip, he reasoned with himself. Before long, however, he heard it again, in a manner that left no outlet for doubt.