gentleness of one of her birth and breeding; but there were lots of other women similarly graced and gifted who were only too eager to welcome him and pet him and make much of him, and towards whom he found himself absolutely indifferent.  Was he falling in love?  Had he been asked the question, he would honestly have answered that he was about the last person in the world to form a romantic attachment.  There was no kind of sentimental wistfulness in his nature; his imagination had no poetical trick of investing the face and form of any passably good-looking girl with a halo of rainbow-hues; even as a lad his dreams had concerned themselves more with the possibility of his becoming a great musician than with his sharing his fame and glory with a radiant bride.  But, above all, the rhodomontade of simulated passion that he heard in the theatre, and the extravagance of action necessary for stage effect, would of themselves have tended to render him sceptical and callous.  He saw too much of how it was done.  Did ever any man in his senses swear by the eternal stars in talking to a woman; and did ever any man in his senses kneel at a woman’s feet?  In former times they may have done so, when fustian and attitudinizing were not fustian and attitudinizing, but common habit and practice; but in our own day did the love-making of the stage, with all its frantic gestures and wild appeals, represent anything belonging to actual life?  Of course, if the question had been pushed home, he would have had to admit that love as a violent passion does veritably exist, or otherwise there would not be so many young men blowing out their brains, and young women drowning themselves, out of disappointment; but probably he would have pointed out that in these cases the coroner’s jury invariably and charitably certify that the victim is insane.

No; romance had never been much in his way, except the sham romance which he had assumed along with a painted face and a stage costume, and of which he knew the just and accurate value.  He had never had time to fall seriously in love, he used to say to Maurice Mangan.  And now, in this long spell of idleness in the North, amid these gracious surroundings, if he had had to confess that he found a singular fascination in the society of Honnor Cunyngham, why, he would have discovered a dozen reasons and excuses rather than admit that poetical sentiment had anything to do with it.  For one thing, she was different from any woman he had ever met before; and that of itself piqued his curiosity.  You had to speak the downright truth to her—­when she looked at you with those clear hazel eyes; little make-believes of flattery were of no use at all.  Her very tranquillity and isolation were a sort of challenge; her almost masculine independence was like to drive a man to say, “I am as peremptory as she proud-minded.”  Nevertheless, she was no curst Katherine; her temper was of the serenest; she was almost too bland and placid, Lionel thought—­it showed she cared too little about you to be either exacting and petulant, or, on the other hand, solicitous to please.