He felt and recognized it by the instinct of love, rather than by any intellectual perception.

Intellectually, he was, in spite of his superior culture, far Mercy's inferior.

He had been brave enough and manly enough to recognize this, and also to recognize what it took still more manliness to recognize,--that she could never love a man of his temperament.

It would have been very easy for him to love Mercy.

He was not a man of a passionate nature; but he felt himself strangely stirred whenever he looked into her sensitive, orchid-like face.