“This is but the beginning,” he groaned.  “Since I am his kinsman and we have been friends, I am bound as a man upon the rack is bound while he is torn limb from limb.  I must see it all—­there will be no escape.  At their marriage I must attend them.  God save me—­taking my fit place as the chief of my house at the nuptials of a well beloved kinsman, I must share in the rejoicings, and be taunted by his rapture and her eyes.  Nay, nay, she cannot gaze at him as she would have gazed at me—­she cannot!  Yet how shall I endure!”

For hours he walked to and fro, the mere sense of restless movement being an aid to his mood.  Sometimes again he flung himself into a seat and sat with hidden eyes.  But he could not shut out the pictures his fevered fancy painted for him.  A man of strong imagination, and who is possessed by a growing passion, cannot fail to depict to himself, and live in, vivid dreams of that future of his hopes which is his chiefest joy.  So he had dreamed, sometimes almost with the wild fervour of a boy, smiling while he did it, at his own pleasure in the mere detail his fancy presented to him.  In these day-dreams his wealth, the beauty and dignity of his estates, the brilliant social atmosphere his rank assured him, had gained a value he had never recognised before.  He remembered now, with torturing distinctness, the happy day when it had first entered his mind, that those things which had been his daily surroundings from his childhood would all be new pleasures to her, all in strong contrast to the atmosphere of her past years.  His heart actually leapt at the thought of the smilingness of fortune which had lavished upon him so much, that ’twould be rapture to him to lay at her feet.  He had remembered tenderly the stately beauty of his beloved Camylott, the bosky dells at Marlowell Dane, the quaint dignity of the Elizabethan manor at Paulyn Dorlocke, the soft hills near Mertounhurst, where myriads of harebells grew and swayed in the summer breeze as it swept them; and the clear lake in the park at Roxholm, where the deer came to drink, and as a boy he had lain in his boat and rocked among the lily-pads in the early morning, when the great white water-flowers spread their wax cups broad and seemed to hold the gold of the sun.  His life had been so full of beauty and fair things; wheresoever his lot had fallen at any time he had had fair days, fair nights, and earth’s loveliness to behold.  And all he had loved and joyed in, he had known she would love and joy in, too.  What a chatelaine she would make, he had thought; how the simple rustic folk would worship her!  What a fit setting for her beauty would seem the grand saloons of Osmonde House!  What a fit and queen-like wearer she would be for the marvellous jewels which had crowned fair heads and clasped fair throats and arms for centuries!  There were diamonds all England had heard rumour of, and he had even lost himself in a lover’s fancy of an hour when he himself would clasp a certain dazzling collar round the column of her throat, and never yet had he given himself to the fancy but in his vision he had laid his lips on the warm whiteness when ’twas done, and lost himself in a passionate kiss—­and she had turned and smiled a heavenly answering bridal smile.