consciousness. I said to myself I should merely perplex my uncle. And in
truth I believe that love, in every mind in which it arises, will vary in
colour and form--will always partake of that mind's individual isolation
in difference. This, however, is nothing to the present point.

Comfort myself as I might, that the impossible was required of no one,
and granted that the thing was impossible, it was none the less a cause
of misery, a present disaster: I was aware, and soon my uncle would be
aware, of an impenetrable something separating us. I felt that we had
already begun to grow strange to each other, and the feeling lay like
death at my heart.

Our lessons together were still going on; that I was no longer a child
had made only the difference that progress must make; and I had no
thought that they would not thus go on always. They were never for a
moment irksome to me; I might be tired by them, but never of them. We
were regularly at work together by seven, and after half an hour for
breakfast, resumed work; at half-past eleven our lessons were over. But
although the day was then clear of the imperative, much the greater part
of it was in general passed in each other's company. We might not speak a
word, but we would be hours together in the study. We might not speak a
word, but we would be hours together on horseback.

For this day, then, our lessons were over, and my uncle was from home.
This was an indisputable relief, yet the fact that it was so, pained me
keenly, for I recognized in it the first of the schism. How I got through
the day, I cannot tell. I was in a dream, not all a dream of delight.
Haunted with the face I had seen, and living in the new consciousness it
had waked in me, I spent most of it in the garden, now in the glooms of
the yew-walks, and now in the smiling wilderness. It was odd, however,