Time, unfortunately, seemed arrayed against him, for it was in April of the same year that he met Miss Lilias Anstruther.  
Their meeting summed up the possibilities of love at sight. He loved her as she passed him on the stairs, and she him, as she afterwards confided, while he was being led to her for introduction, an occasion which has—for an Englishman, at any rate—small opportunities of display.
 
But love at sight is such a miracle to the seer that he never imagines its duplication. Terence saw nothing on Miss Anstruther's features but the attention an intelligent woman might show to any man with a name in the making.
 
She imagined, in the stern set of his, boredom at having to make himself agreeable to a merely pretty girl.
 
There was, in his mind, no doubt, enough to complicate a glance of admiration, since he saw between him and her the jealous presence of another woman.
 
What that presence meant to him, now, he realized with despair.
 
He had endured in silence its unscrupulous intrigues; he had schooled himself to meet the most preposterous of its requirements. But then he stood alone; the worst that could be done him was the most that he need fear. He could live secure since only he could suffer.
 
Now! He lost his breath as he thought of it.
 
He saw Lilias several times that month. He did not notice that it seemed easy to see her. That she had a hand in that facility would have been the last thing to strike him.
 
Love had come to him in the extravagant splendours it only wears for those who find it late, with the eyes still unsoiled through which youth sought it. For, to the boy, love is only a white angel, but the man sees it iridescent with the colours of his accumulated years of hope.
 
It was not surprising that Terence, who had never even imagined himself in love before, and whose every instinct forbade a paltering with its substitute, should have been overwhelmed by this putting forth of an enchantment he had long ceased to expect.
 
He kept his head from early habit, which made the danger of losing it in Miss Anstruther's presence almost a delight, and he banished the acknowledgment of his happiness from every part of him but his eyes.
 
There, however, in the glow of an accustomed kindliness it could escape recognition, and there too it was often absorbed in a stern anxiety when he faced the risks of its discovery by the other woman.
 
From her he kept, with a man's timorous diplomacy, every echo of the girl's name, until he learnt they were acquainted. Then he had to endure an inquest on his concealment, and the woman's suspicions were fertilized by his replies.
 
They found food for growth later on in what she was pleased, perhaps rightly, to imagine a preoccupation in his manner.
 
She was, of course, aware of his effort to dilute what was emotional in their intercourse, and to replace it with a tender and unashamed fraternity.
 
Of that he made no secret; and she made very little of her resolve to thwart it.
 
He had but small success but more than he expected. He declined several invitations to Wallingford during the summer, where she had again a house; and when he went in August, found her, thanks partly to the persistence of some exacting and undesired guests, more malleable than she had ever been before.
 
He had been so attentively kind to her during the season that she found no excuse to upbraid him, yet she showed by a dozen disdainful poses how fiercely she resented his determined friendliness.
 
Meanwhile he had seen little of Lilias. His devotion to her was too sensitive and too entire to allow him even to offer her his company while he had still, however occasionally, to bestow his kisses on another woman. That woman too was still a moral charge upon him, and a source beside of incalculable danger.
 
What she would not do was clearly not everywhere conterminous with what she should not.
 
He had sufficiently realized that his happiness would never appeal to her apart from hers, and that there would be a stormy finish where hers ended. But he still trusted in time, and was satisfied with the slight progress towards reasonableness in their relationship.
 
Her letters continued to upbraid him with his neglect; but they began to hint at a reciprocal attitude.
 
She too, they threatened, could be indifferent; the time might come when to his appeal there would be no response.
 
Terence prayed devoutly for that day to hasten, as the months went on; and ran down in November, ostensibly for a week's hunting, to a house in Leicestershire where Miss Anstruther was staying.
 
Knowing the country better than he, she offered to pilot him, and took him under her charge with a delightful assurance, which allowed him no voice nor choice of his own while out of doors.
 
She rode straight, but used her head, in cutting out a line, to nurse her horse, and showed a most unfeminine appreciation of distances, save when the hounds were running late away from home.
 
During the long easy amble homeward in the dusk, on such occasions Terence might have been led to doubt that it was inadvertence which had secured him so much of her company, had he not arrived at conclusions of much greater moment.
 
To have found, at thirty-five when such discoveries are being despaired of the woman for whom his life had waited for whom, unknown, it had worn its innocence untainted, was sufficient of itself to monopolize his thoughts.
 
In her presence he became young again; young in interests, in expectancy, in purposeless energies. The whole desire of the man was in focus for the first time in his life.
 
Lilias gave him her company but no other sign of liking; yet her company was of itself sufficient to make him insanely content.
 
Still his fears made him cautious. The prize was too great, the thought of failure too consuming, to admit of risk.
 
So he let the winter go without a word to her of what was eating out his heart, using what chances offered for seeing her, but making none that might attract comment, and all the while attenuating the link that bound him to the other, and trying to accustom her to do without him.
 
He seemed in that to be making headway.
 
She wrote more and more rarely to him, and never in the expansive fashion of the past, and if he kissed her on parting, as occasionally she insisted, it added no warmth to his farewell. Yet he still misdoubted her, and would not have put his fortune to the touch had Fate not forced his hand with the announcement that Miss Anstruther was leaving for India in the spring.
 
He looked in vain for ways to stop her, but shyly, and conscious of a new distance in her manner, as though she thought his interest might be more explicit.
 
On that he spoke. Her evasions, chilly with the disdain of every honest woman for a philanderer, were intolerable. He saw the risk he ran either way of losing her, but chose that which gave him, at any rate, fighting chances, and told her of his love.
 
Three days followed in the blue of heaven; then he came back to earth, and took up his trouble.
 
The other woman was at St. Raphael, so he had to write. He would have vastly preferred to tell her face to face what he had done. He had no courage for a fight in the dark; he wished to see the blow come back, and meet it. But there were reasons insuperable against that.
 
He expected an intemperate reply, but nothing so wildly bereft of reason as that which reached him. It was shrill with threats which turned his blood to ice and then set it boiling with indignation; threats which seemed to echo from some shrieking purlieu of the Mile End Road.
 
Her soul revolted, she wrote, at what he had done. He had thrown her away like stale water. His selfishness had made her life unbearable. Her pride, her capacity for caring, her whole womanhood had been hurt and crushed to death.
 
She went about feeling there was no meaning any more in anything. He had hardened and embittered her nature to a terrible degree.
 
He had hurt her so unendurably that it didn't seem to matter how she hurt others.
 
Love and truth and honour had become a farce, and loyalty was an unnecessary scruple.
 
She ended by saying she did not know how long she could go on bearing it in silence. The only fair thing seemed to be to tell Miss Anstruther everything that had happened, and let her judge between them.
 
Despite the sense of his integrity, and a dreary memory of the months devoted to her whims, Terence almost felt himself to be, as he read her impeachment, the unspeakable brute that she described.
 
He even tried to excuse her horrid and unexpected forms of speech; the clamour, the invective, the dismal absence of reserve. If she had overleapt the bounds of decency he had given her the impetus, and to be startled by such an exhibition only argued his inexperience.
 
Yet even his generosity could not acquit her. He remembered her repeated wail, "Tell me I haven't spoilt your life!"—a cry which no ardour of his assurance seemed able to satisfy. Well, now she had the only proof that could appease her conscience, and this was the result. He showed her that his life was still whole, and she itched to break it beyond repair.
 
His resentment quickened. Surely it was more than should be asked of a man's benevolence to sacrifice his life to no purpose for a woman's mistake.
 
He wrote urgently, and as he thought in reason; but the letter read to her as a wrathful menace. He had explained that in trying to hurt others she might hurt herself the more, since to alienate Miss Anstruther would be to make a lifelong enemy of himself.
 
She replied in such spiritless dejection that he had to try to comfort her. She asked why he had been in such a hurry to supersede her; and though his patience of many months seemed to him misnamed as hurry, he explained the circumstance which made him speak.
 
Many letters passed between them: letters coloured on her part by a childish irresponsibility and persistence, and on his by an attempt, a fatal attempt, to treat her as a child, and to let her hug the little salves to her vanity which she invented daily and submitted piteously for his confirmation.
 
Terence discovered, when it was too late, that sooner than allow that any one could supplant her in his affection, she had pictured his proposal as a man's heroic sacrifice of himself to a girl's forwardness, and his letters had unconsciously confirmed her fatuous invention.
 
Consoled by it, she wrote to Lilias a letter of congratulation, and her correspondence with Terence grew heavy with the odour of a shared and precarious secret which she, at least, would make honourable pretences to ignore.
 
Terence, at his wit's end for peace, capitulated to her self-complacent theory, after a half-hearted attempt to take it from her.
 
To destroy her faith in it seemed needlessly unkind, seeing how much her faith in everything else appeared to be bound up therein. And if her comfort in it was false, false it had been all along, from the days when for her sake he had fostered it. Now, at any rate, it brought comfort to them both.
 
He was shown the letter Lilias had received from her, and thought his danger at an end. Yet he went softly, not daring to own the intensity of his happiness even to himself. He tried to keep the joy of it from his mind, to walk humbly as a mortal should, lest the gods might grow jealous of his exulting dreams.
 
Yet at times, despite his caution, at the higher tides of his delight, he would laugh up in the face of heaven, not arrogantly, but with the overrunning sense of his content.
 
A woman's lips had breathed their ephphatha upon his eyelids, and he looked out upon a new world.
 
New, since her beauty, like a crystal spar, lent a rainbow border to all things beyond it. His life seemed lifted by a spread of wings at every touch of her fingers.
 
There was a magic in her influence, that fed from the soft reluctance of her body the fuel that burned in his. A magic on which he lived between their meetings, and for whose strange infusio............