Hamilton was honourable and shy, and Rachael
was a woman of uncommon strength of character and had been brought up by
a woman of austere virtue. These causes held them apart for a time, but
one might as well have attempted to block two comets rushing at each
other in the same orbit. The magnetism of the Inevitable embraced them
and knit their inner selves together, even while they sat decorously
apart. Rachael had taken off her hat at once, and even after it grew
dark in their arbour, Hamilton fancied he could see the gleam of her
hair. Her eyes were startled and brilliant, and her nostrils quivered
uneasily, but she defined none of the sensations that possessed her but
the overwhelming recrudescence of her youth. It had seemed to her that
it flamed from its ashes before Dr. Hamilton finished his formal words
of introduction, and all its forgotten hopes and impulses, timidity and
vagueness, surged through her brain during those hours beside the
stranger, submerging the memory of Levine. Indeed, she felt even younger
than before maturity so suddenly had been thrust upon her; for in those
old days she had been almost as severely intellectual as yesterday, and
when she had dreamed of the future, it had been with the soberness of an
overtaxed brain.
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