The invitation of the water could not draw him to it till he knew Claudia's will.

But if she failed him, was not that the only thing left?
His desire had swallowed up his life, and seemed to point to death as the only alternative to its own satisfaction.

He contemplated this conclusion, not with the personal interest of a man who thought he might be called to act upon it,--Claudia would rescue him from that,--but with a theoretical certainty that if by any chance the staff on which he leant should break, he would be in no other mind than that from which he had rescued his miserable shop-boy.

Death for love's sake was held up in poetry and romance as a thing in some sort noble and honorable; as a man might die because he could not save his country, so might he because he could not please his lady-love.

In old days, Stafford, rigidly repressing his aesthetic delight in such literature, had condemned its teaching with half-angry contempt, and enough of his former estimate of things remained to him to prevent him regarding such a state of mind as it pictured as a romantic elevation rather than a hopeless degradation of a man's being.