And this did not make him much wiser or merrier.  Love has its fevers, its recoveries, and its relapses.  The patient—­nay even his nurse and his doctor, if he has taken to himself such officers in his distress—­may believe the malady quite cured—­the passion burnt out—­the flame extinct—­even the smoke quite over, when a little chance puff of rivalry blows the white ashes off, and, lo! the old liking is still smouldering.  But this was not Devereux’s case.  He remembered when his fever—­not a love one—­and his leave of absence at Scarborough, and that long continental tour of hers with Aunt Rebecca and Gertrude Chattesworth, had carried the grave, large-eyed little girl away, and hid her from his sight for more than a year, very nearly two years, the strange sort of thrill and surprise with which he saw her again—­tall and slight, and very beautiful—­no, not beautiful, perhaps, if you go to rule and compass, and Greek trigonometrical theories; but there was an indescribable prettiness in all her features, and movements, and looks, higher, and finer, and sweeter than all the canons of statuary will give you.

How prettily she stands! how prettily she walks! what a sensitive, spirited, clear-tinted face it is!  This was pretty much the interpretation of his reverie, as Colonel Stafford’s large and respectable party obligingly vanished for a while into air.  Is it sad?  I think it is sad—­I don’t know—­and how sweetly and how drolly it lighted up; at that moment he saw her smile—­the pleasant mischief in it—­the dark violet glance—­the wonderful soft dimple in chin and cheek—­the little crimson mouth, and its laughing coronet of pearls—­and then all earnest again, and still so animated!  What feminine intelligence and character there is in that face!—­’tis pleasanter to me than conversation—­’tis a fairy tale, or—­or a dream, it’s so interesting—­I never know, you see, what’s coming—­Is not it wonderful?  What is she talking about now?—­what does it signify?—­she’s so strangely beautiful—­she’s like those Irish melodies, I can’t reach all their meaning; I only know their changes keep me silent, and are playing with my heart-strings.

Devereux’s contemplation of the animated tete-a-tete, for such, in effect, it seemed to him at the other side of the table, was, however, by no means altogether pleasurable.  He began to think Mervyn conceited; there was a ‘provoking probability of succeeding’ about him, and altogether something that was beginning to grow offensive and odious.

‘She knows well enough I like her,’ so his liking said in confidence to his vanity, and even he hardly overheard them talk; ’better a great deal than I knew it myself, till old Strafford got together this confounded stupid dinner-party (he caught Miss Chattesworth glancing at him with a peculiar look of enquiry).  Why the plague did he ask me here? it was Puddock’s turn, and he likes venison and compots, and—­and—­but ’tis like them—­the women fall in love with the man who’s in love with himself, like Narcissus yonder—­and they can’t help it—­not they—­and what care I?—­hang it!  I say, what is’t to me?—­and yet—­if she were to leave it—­what a queer unmeaning place Chapelizod would be!’