HERE had never been the slightest question as to their relations. I had indeed fallen at one time into the common folly of the lover, and nursed a bitter jealousy of him, but after the passage of this madness the merest observation had been sufficient to re-assure me. It is true he was unmarried, and had many qualities that take a woman, but I believe he was really quite indifferent to the sex save as the source of some amusing friends. He was very sober and good-natured, and had a lazy regard for every one that came within his acquaintance. The two had grown up in the same countryside, and were on terms of unusual intimacy. She considered him a man of the world, which he was beyond question, and assumed him as a person of profound knowledge, which as certainly he was not. These opinions, with those early associations, were the credentials upon which she assigned him the position of her guide and counsellor. He was no doubt an excellent fellow, sufficiently wise; but from the moment of my infatuation I viewed his easy access to her with much chagrin and envy. So close a proximity was denied me, though I made the most desperate efforts to obtain her confidence. It seemed that I was never to persuade her of her affection for me. In the privacy of my own thoughts I had long since resolved upon the state of her heart. Many signs pointed at her condition; for one thing she had come to betray a blushing embarrassment if we met of a sudden, and though she was able to recover pretty quickly, after the manner of women, yet her eyes would still hold their trouble for some little time, as though her nature were but slowly settling from its disturbance. Indeed she was herself most uncertain of her mind, and sometimes I thought I had detected in her little airs of conduct a fear of her own bewilderment. She was new to the sensations, and avoided considering them with an instinct something between awe and shame. I think if she had found the courage to confront herself boldly she would have confessed to an attachment for me, would at least have realised in what current she was drifting, even if she did not acknowledge it openly. But hitherto her heart had been absolutely virginal, and to find it suddenly active with strange feelings was to throw her into a confusion she could not understand. Her soul was so private and so dainty that the presence therein of a new and foreign interest set her quivering with maidenly alarm; she fled from the thought and memory of it, but there it was, still awaiting her on her return, a veiled and silent mystery she would not examine. It was this doubt drove her back upon her established companion, not for advice indeed, but as a familiar landmark with which she need have no scruples.
My passion was very manifest, and I was aware he watched it, as it were, out of his sleepy eyes. I did not mind that the world should observe it, if only it were from a little distance; but that he, so close a neighbour of her own, so intimate an environment of our two selves, should be the witness of my uneven passage to her heart, chafed me beyond endurance. I believe he was so indifferent to her beauty that it was a quiet amusement for him to note the love of others for her. Of all these I was assuredly the most in her thoughts, and yet she held me at a greater distance than any, while he looked on with his smile. He was privileged with opportunities of sight and touch of her, which were nothing to him, but would have been all the world to me. Had he been her brother, their close friendship would not have annoyed me; but there he was, unperturbed, in serene possession, so to say, with the most obvious and irresistible chances to his hand—and not a natural tie between them. It is true he was never impertinent in his observance, never by a word gave me a hint of his knowledge; but his eyes followed me in the course of my passion; and it irked me to remark the intelligent regard with which he met me.