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what the long hunger for affection must have been. Yet even now, how impossible to satisfy it, as other women could satisfy it! What ghosts and shadows about the path of friendship!
"A dim and perilous way," his mind went sounding back along the intricacies of Alice Puttenham's story. The old problems arose in connection with it--problems now of ethics, now of expediency. And interfused with them a sense of dull amazement and yet of intolerable repetition--in this difficulty which had risen with regard to Hester. The owner of Sandford--_and Hester!_ When he had first seen them together, it had seemed a thing so sinister that his mind had refused to take it seriously. A sharp word to her, a word of warning to her natural guardians--and surely all was mended. Philip never stayed more than three weeks in the old house; he would very soon be gone, and Hester's fancy would turn to something else.
But that the passing shock should become anything more! There rose before Meynell's imagination a vision of the two by the river, not in the actual brightness of the August afternoon, but bathed, as it were, in angry storm-light; behind them, darkness, covering "old, unhappy, far-off things." From that tragical gloom it seemed as though their young figures had but just emerged, unnaturally clear; and yet the trailing clouds were already threatening the wild beauty of the girl.
He blamed himself for lack of foresight. It should have been utterly impossible for those two to meet! Meryon generally appeared at Sandford three times a year, for various sporting purposes. Hester might easily have been sent away during these descents. But the fact was she had grown up so rapidly--yesterday a mischievous child, to-day a woman in her first bloom--that they had all been taken by surprise. Besides, who could have imagined any communication whatever between the Fox-Wilton household and the riotous party at Sandford Abbey?
As to the girl herself, Meynell was always conscious of being engaged in some long st