But Lucy shook her head, "It is no good, I only wish it were—though I don't know why you should care so much."
They rode on into the village, and Laxton showed the good stuff he was made of by coming, as he had said he would, to the Grange, where Mrs. Kemp, after glancing at Lucy, entertained him with a pitying and heavy heart.
CHAPTER IX.
"Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world."
R. L. S.
Love has been described, by one who had a singularly intuitive knowledge of men's hearts, as a vital malady, and in one essential matter the similitude holds good—namely, in the amazing suddenness with which the divine fever will sometimes, nay often, seize upon its victim, driving out for the time being all other and allied ills, leaving room only for the one all-consuming passion.
James Berwick was one of those men—more rarely found perhaps in England than on the Continent, and less often now than in the leisurely days of the past—who can tell themselves that they are pastmasters in the art of love. Two things in life were to him of absorbing interest—politics and women, and he found, as have done so many of his fellows, that the two were seldom in material conflict. His sister, Miss Berwick, did not agree in this finding, but she kept her views and her occasional misgivings to herself.
Women had always played a great part in James Berwick's life, and that, as is generally true of the typical lover, in a very wide sense, as often as not "en tout bien tout honneur." He thought no hour wasted which was spent in feminine company: he was tender to the pruderies, submissive to the caprices, and very grateful for the affection often lavished on him by good and kindly women, to whom the thought of any closer tie than that of friendship would have been an outrage.
More than once he had been very near, or so he had thought at the time, to the finding of his secret ideal,—of that woman who should be at once lover and friend. But some element, generally that of the selfless tenderness for which his heart craved, was lacking in the unlawful loves to which he considered himself compelled to confine his quest.