and retreating in monitory procession, while he
still kept his ear open for another kind of signal which would have its
solemnity too. He was beginning to sicken of occupation, and found himself
contemplating all activity with the aloofness of a prisoner awaiting ransom. In
his letters to Mordecai and Hans, he had avoided writing about himself, but he
was really getting into that state of mind to which all subjects become
personal; and the few books he had brought to make him a refuge in study were
becoming unreadable, because the point of view that life would make for him was
in that agitating moment of uncertainty which is close upon decision.
    Many nights were watched through by him in gazing from the open window of
his room on the double, faintly pierced darkness of the sea and the heavens:
often in struggling under the oppressive scepticism which represented his
particular lot, with all the importance he was allowing Mordecai to give it, as
of no more lasting effect than a dream - a set of changes which made passion to
him, but beyond his consciousness were no more than an imperceptible difference
of mass or shadow; sometimes with a reaction of emotive force which gave even to
sustained disappointment, even to the fulfilled demand of sacrifice, the nature
of a satisfied energy, and spread over his young future, whatever it might be,
the attraction of devoted service; sometimes with a sweet irresistible
hopefulness that the very best of human possibilities might befall him - the
blending of a complete personal love in one current with a larger duty; and
sometimes again in a mood of rebellion (what human creature escapes it?) against
things in general because they are thus and not otherwise, a mood in which
Gwendolen and her equivocal fate moved as busy images of what was amiss in the
world along with the concealments which he had felt as a hardship in his own
life, and which were acting in him now under the form of an afflicting
doubtfulness about the mother who had announced herself coldly and still kept
away.
    But at last she was come. One morning in his third week of waiting there was
a new kind of knock at the door. A servant in chasseur's livery entered and
delivered in French the verbal message that the Princess Halm-Eberstein had
arrived, that she was going to rest during the day, but would be obliged if
Monsieur would dine early, so as to be at liberty at seven, when she would be
able to receive him.
 

                                   Chapter LI

 She held the spindle as she sat,
 Erinna with the thick-coiled mat
 Of raven hair and deepest agate eyes,
 Gazing with a sad