 my mind; think with me, feel
with me. When you have once comprehended the intensity of the love of a man like
me, you will not require asking. It is the difference of the elect and the
vulgar; of the ideal of love from the coupling of the herds. We will let it
drop. At least, I have your hand. As long as I live I have your hand. Ought I
not to be satisfied? I am; only, I see farther than most men, and feel more
deeply. And now I must ride to my mother's bedside. She dies Lady Patterne! It
might have been that she ... but she is a woman of women! With a father-in-law!
Just heaven! Could I have stood by her then with the same feelings of reverence?
A very little, my love, and everything gained for us by civilization crumbles;
we fall back to the first mortar-bowl we were bruised and stirred in. My
thoughts, when I take my stand to watch by her, come to this conclusion, that,
especially in women, distinction is the thing to be aimed at. Otherwise we are a
weltering human mass. Women must teach us to venerate them, or we may as well be
bleating and barking and bellowing. So, now enough. You have but to think a
little. I must be off. It may have happened during my absence. I will write. I
shall hear from you? Come and see me mount Black Norman. My respects to your
father. I have no time to pay them in person. One!«
    He took the one - love's mystical number - from which commonly spring
multitudes; but, on the present occasion, it was a single one, and cold. She
watched him riding away on his gallant horse, as handsome a cavalier as the
world could show, and the contrast of his recent language and his fine figure
was a riddle that froze her blood. Speech so foreign to her ears, unnatural in
tone, unmanlike even for a lover (who is allowed a softer dialect) set her
vainly sounding for the source and drift of it. She was glad of not having to
encounter eyes like Mr. Vernon Whitford's.
    On behalf of Sir Willoughby, it is to be said that his mother, without
infringing on the degree of respect for his decisions and sentiments exacted by
him, had talked to him of Miss Middleton, suggesting a volatility of temperament
in the young lady, that struck him as consentaneous with Mrs
