CHAPTER XXIX.
So fast does a little leaven spread within us--so incalculable is the effect of one personality on another .-- GEORGE ELIOT.
Hugh was not ill after what Mr.Gresley called "his immersion," but for some days he remained feeble and exhausted.

Sybell quite forgot she had not liked him, insisted on his staying on indefinitely at Wilderleigh, and, undaunted by her distressing experience with Mr.Tristram, read poetry to Hugh in the afternoons and surrounded him with genuine warm-hearted care.

Doll was steadily, quietly kind.
It was during these days that Hugh and Rachel saw much of each other, during these days that Rachel passed in spite of herself beyond the anxious impersonal interest which Hugh had awakened in her, on to that slippery much-trodden ground of uncomfortable possibilities where the unmarried meet.
Hugh attracted and repelled her.
It was, alas! easy to say why she was repelled.

But who shall say why she was attracted?
Has the secret law ever been discovered which draws one man and woman together amid the crowd?
Hugh was not among the best men who had wished to marry her, but nevertheless he was the only man since Mr.Tristram who had succeeded in making her think continually of him.

And perhaps she half knew that though she had been loved by better men, Hugh loved her better than they had.
Which would prove the stronger, the attraction or the repulsion?
"How can I ?" she said to herself, over and over again.
"When I remember Lady Newhaven, how can I?
When I think of what his conduct was for a whole year, how can I?
Can he have any sense of honor to have acted like that?
Is he even really sorry?
He is very charming, very refined, and he loves me.