He had found him, not "pacing Heaven's
golden floor," but staggering across Miss Grace's drawing-room, a most
offensive, fifth-rate, disreputable little god. Of course he knew it
wasn't the same thing, it wasn't the same thing at all. But he was
bound by his past. He had forged a chain of infamous but irresistible
association that degraded love in his eyes, that in his thoughts
degraded _her_. Every hour that he had spent in the little dancer's
society had its kindred with this hour. In his passion for Lucia
Harden there leapt up the passion of that night--that night three
weeks ago. It was then--then--that he had sinned against her.
He had not meant--he had not meant to love her--like that. And yet he
perceived how all along, unremittently, imperceptibly, this passion
had waylaid him and misled him and found him out. It was it that had
drawn him every morning across the fields to Court House, that upheld
him on his giddy perch on the library steps, that chained him to his
chair at the library table and kept him sweating over that abominable
catalogue till four o'clock in the morning. It had looked at him with
so pure and spiritual a face that he had not recognized it. But how
otherwise could he have stayed here for three weeks, fooling with that
unlucky conscience of his; persuading it one minute that he had
nothing to do with Miss Harden, and that her father's affairs were no
business of his, the next that they were so much his business that he
was bound not to betray them; while as for Miss Harden, he had so much
to do with her that it was his duty to stay where he was and protect
her? He had had absolutely no duty in the matter except to tell her
the truth and clear out.
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