The laboured resistance which Lady Constantine's judgment had offered to
her rebellious affection ere she learnt that she was a widow, now passed
into a bashfulness that rendered her almost as unstable of mood as
before. But she was one of that mettle--fervid, cordial, and
spontaneous--who had not the heart to spoil a passion; and her affairs
having gone to rack and ruin by no fault of her own she was left to a
painfully narrowed existence which lent even something of rationality to
her attachment. Thus it was that her tender and unambitious soul found
comfort in her reverses.
As for St. Cleeve, the tardiness of his awakening was the natural result
of inexperience combined with devotion to a hobby. But, like a spring
bud hard in bursting, the delay was compensated by after speed. At once
breathlessly recognizing in this fellow-watcher of the skies a woman who
loved him, in addition to the patroness and friend, he truly translated
the nearly forgotten kiss she had given him in her moment of despair.
Lady Constantine, in being eight or nine years his senior, was an object
even better calculated to nourish a youth's first passion than a girl of
his own age, superiority of experience and ripeness of emotion exercising
the same peculiar fascination over him as over other young men in their
first ventures in this kind.
The alchemy which thus transmuted an abstracted astronomer into an eager
lover--and, must it be said, spoilt a promising young physicist to
produce a common-place inamorato--may be almost described as working its
change in one short night. Next morning he was so fascinated with the
novel sensation that he wanted to rush off at once to Lady Constantine,
and say, 'I love you true!' in the intensest tones of his mental
condition, to register his assertion in her heart before any of those
accidents which 'creep in 'twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,'
should occur to hinder him. But his embarrassment at standing in a new
position towards her would not allow him to present himself at her door
in any such hurry. He waited on, as helplessly as a girl, for a chance
of encountering her.
But though she had tacitly agreed to see him on any reasonable occasion,
Lady Constantine did not put herself in his way. She even kept herself
out of his way. Now that for the first time he had learnt to feel a
strong impatience for their meeting, her shyness for the first time led
her to delay it. But given two people living in one parish, who long
from the depths of their hearts to be in each other's company, what
resolves of modesty, policy, pride, or apprehension will keep them for
any length of time apart?