He had been a man of letters and a traveller before he entered politics.

She remembered--nay, she would never forget--a volume of letters from Palestine, written by him, which had reached her through the free library of the little town near her home.
She who read slowly, but, when she admired, with a silent and worshipping ardour, had read this book, had hidden it under her pillow, had been haunted for days by its pliant sonorous sentences, by the colour, the perfume, the melancholy of pages that seemed to her dreaming youth marvellous, inimitable.

There were descriptions of a dawn at Bethlehem--a night wandering at Jerusalem--a reverie by the sea of Galilee--the very thought of which made her shiver a little, so deeply had they touched her young and pure imagination.
And then--people talked so angrily of his quarrel with the Government--and his resigning.

They said he had been foolish, arrogant, unwise.

Perhaps.
But after all it had been to his own hurt--it must have been for principle.
So far the girl's secret instinct was all on his side.
Meanwhile, as she dressed, there floated through her mind fragments of what she had been told as to his strange personal beauty; but these she only entertained shyly and in passing.