"She will--she will." Did he mean this, our young man wondered, as a
covert intimation that the assistance he should derive from that young
lady's fortune, moderate as it was, would make the difference of putting
it in his power to cease to work ungratefully an exhausted vein? Somehow,
standing there in the ripeness of his successful manhood, he didn't
suggest that any of his veins were exhausted. "Don't you remember the
moral I offered myself to you that night as pointing?" St. George
continued. "Consider at any rate the warning I am at present."

This was too much--he _was_ the mocking fiend. Paul turned from him with
a mere nod for good-night and the sense in a sore heart that he might
come back to him and his easy grace, his fine way of arranging things,
some time in the far future, but couldn't fraternise with him now. It
was necessary to his soreness to believe for the hour in the intensity of
his grievance--all the more cruel for its not being a legal one. It was
doubtless in the attitude of hugging this wrong that he descended the
stairs without taking leave of Miss Fancourt, who hadn't been in view at
the moment he quitted the room. He was glad to get out into the honest
dusky unsophisticating night, to move fast, to take his way home on foot.
He walked a long time, going astray, paying no attention. He was
thinking of too many other things. His steps recovered their direction,
however, and at the end of an hour he found himself before his door in
the small inexpensive empty street. He lingered, questioning himself
still before going in, with nothing around and above him but moonless
blackness, a bad lamp or two and a few far-away dim stars. To these last
faint features he raised his eyes; he had been saying to himself that he
should have been "sold" indeed, diabolically sold, if now, on his new
foundation, at the end of a year, St. George were to put forth something
of his prime quality--something of the type of "Shadowmere" and finer
than his finest. Greatly as he admired his talent Paul literally hoped