'Shall I?' said he, doing the thing he asked himself about doing tearing
open the paper cover of the portrait of her who had flitted in his head
for years unseen. And there she was, remote but present.

His underlip dropped; he had the look of those who bate breath and swarm
their wits to catch a sound. At last he remembered that the summoning
bell had been in his ears a long time back, without his having been
sensible of any meaning in it. He started to and fro. The treasure he
held declined to enter the breast-pocket of his coat, and the other
pockets he perhaps, if sentimentally, justly discarded as being beneath
the honour of serving for a temporary casket. He locked it up, with a
vow to come early to rest. Even then he had thoughts whether it might be
safe.

Who spoke, and what they uttered at the repast, and his own remarks, he
was unaware of. He turned right and left a brilliant countenance that
had the glitter of frost-light; it sparkled and was unreceptive. No
wonder Miss Adister deemed him wilder and stranger than ever. She
necessarily supposed the excess of his peculiarities to be an effect of
the portrait, and would have had him, according to her ideas of a young
man of some depth of feeling, dreamier. On the contrary, he talked sheer
commonplace. He had ridden to the spur of the mountains, and had put up
the mare, and groomed and fed her, not permitting another hand to touch
her: all very well, and his praises of the mare likewise, but he had not
a syllable for the sublime of the mountains. He might have careered over
midland flats for any susceptibility that he betrayed to the grandeur of
the scenery she loved. Ultimately she fancied the miniature had been
overlooked in his hurry to dress, and that he was now merely excited by
his lively gallop to a certain degree of hard brightness noticeable in