It was the autumn of the year, in the spring of which Walter Joyce had returned to London from Westhope. Six months had elapsed since he had read what he had almost imagined to be his death-warrant in Marian's reply to his letter containing the Berlin proposal. It was not his death-warrant; he had survived the shock, and, indeed, had borne the disappointment in a way that he did not think possible when the blow first fell upon him. Under the blessed, soothing influence of time, under the perhaps more effectual influence of active employment, his mind had been weaned from dwelling on that dread blank which, as he at first imagined, was to have been his sole outlook for the future. He was young, and strong, and impressionable; he returned to London inclined to be misanthropical and morose, disposed to believe in the breaking of hearts and the crushing of hopes, and the rather pleasant sensations of despair. But after a very short sojourn in the metropolis, he was compelled to avow to himself the wisdom of Lady Caroline Mansergh's prognostications concerning him, and the absolute truth of everything she had said. A life of moping, of indulgence in preposterous cynicism and self-compassion, was not for him; he was meant for far better things--action in the present, distinction in the future--those were to be his aims, and after a fortnight's indolence and moodiness, he had flung himself into the work that was awaiting him, and begun to labour at it with all his energy and all his brain-power.

Some little time afterwards, when Joyce thought over his mental condition in those first days of ............