There is no man who has given himself up to a growing passion and has not yet revealed it, who does not pass through many an hour of unrest.  How could it be otherwise?  In his absence from the object of his feeling every man who lives is his possible rival, every woman his possible enemy, every event a possible obstacle in the way to that he yearns for.  And from this situation there is nothing which can save a man.  He need not be a boy or a fool to be tormented despite himself; the wisest and gravest are victims to these fits of heat and cold if they have modesty and know somewhat of the game of chance called Life.  What may not happen to a castle left undefended; what may not be filched from coffers left unlocked?  This is the history of a man who, despite the lavishness of Fortune and the gifts she had poured forth before him, was of a stately humility.  That he was a Duke and of great estate, that he had already been caressed by the hand of Fame and had been born more stalwart and beautiful than nine men of ten, did not, to his mind, make sure for him the love of any woman whom he had not served and won.  He was of no meek spirit, but he had too much wit and too great knowledge of the chances of warfare not to know that in love’s campaign, as in any other, a man must be on the field if he would wield his sword.

So my lord Duke had his days of fret and restlessness as less fortunate men have them, and being held on the Continent by duties he had undertaken in calmer moments, lay sometimes awake at night reproaching himself that he had left England.  Such hours do not make a man grow cooler, and by the time the second year had ripened, the months were long indeed.  Well as he had thought he knew himself, there were times when the growth of this passion which possessed him awaked in him somewhat of wonder.  ’Twas for one with whom he had yet never exchanged word or glance, a creature whose wild youth seemed sometimes a century away from him.  There had been so many others who had crossed his path—­great beauties and small ones—­but only to this one had his being cried out aloud.

“It has begun,” he had said to himself.  “I have heard them tell of it—­of how one woman’s face came back to a man again and again, of how her eyes would look into his and would not leave him or let him rest.  It has begun for me, too.”

He had grave duties to perform, affairs of serious import to arrange, interviews to hold with great personages and small, and though none might read it in his bearing he found himself ever beholding this face, ever followed by the eyes which would not leave him and which, had they done so, would have left him to the dark.  Yet this was hid within his own breast and was his own strange secret which he gave himself up to dwell upon but when he was alone.  When he awakened in the morning he lay and thought of it and counted that a day had passed and another begun, and found himself pondering, as all those in his case do, on the events