CHAPTER X.


What wonderful things are events! The least are of greater importance than
the most sublime and comprehensive speculations! In what fanciful schemes
to obtain the friendship of Coningsby had Millbank in his reveries often
indulged! What combinations that were to extend over years and influence
their lives! But the moment that he entered the world of action, his pride
recoiled from the plans and hopes which his sympathy had inspired. His
sensibility and his inordinate self-respect were always at variance. And
he seldom exchanged a word with the being whose idea engrossed his
affection.

And now, suddenly, an event had occurred, like all events, unforeseen,
which in a few, brief, agitating, tumultuous moments had singularly and
utterly changed the relations that previously subsisted between him and
the former object of his concealed tenderness. Millbank now stood with
respect to Coningsby in the position of one who owes to another the
greatest conceivable obligation; a favour which time could permit him
neither to forget nor to repay. Pride was a sentiment that could no longer
subsist before the preserver of his life. Devotion to that being, open,
almost ostentatious, was now a duty, a paramount and absorbing tie. The
sense of past peril, the rapture of escape, a renewed relish for the life
so nearly forfeited, a deep sentiment of devout gratitude to the
providence that had guarded over him, for Millbank was an eminently
religious boy, a thought of home, and the anguish that might have