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Updated: June 10, 2025
"I think it would," said Miss Milbourne. "No, it would not" was the obstinate reply. "I should take care to find a lotos as soon as I reached the Nile. Whoever eats of that forgets his past life, you know. I have scant reason for wishing to remember mine," he added a little bitterly. "Memory is certainly more often a sting than a pleasure," said Miss Milbourne.
As he crossed the room he saw Eleanor Milbourne for the first time since his arrival. He had not even inquired if she was still at The Willows, and her unexpected appearance, for he had begun to fear that she was gone, filled him with a rush of feelings of which the first and most prominent was delight. After all, did it matter whether or not she was engaged to Marston Brent?
Brent asked Eleanor if she would not accompany him to the eastern side of the mountain to see the moon rise. While she hesitated, uncertain what to say, Clare's voice spoke quietly at her side. "Miss Milbourne has an engagement with me," he said. "I fear you must defer the pleasure of admiring the moon in her society for a little while, Mr. Brent." Then to Eleanor, "Shall we go now?"
Lancaster with a slight tone of bitterness in her voice. "Forgive me," said he after a minute. "I am a fool on this subject, and, like a fool, I always say more than I mean. No doubt there are other women in the world even more beautiful and more charming than Eleanor Milbourne, but they are nothing to me."
The comparison was not at all highflown to Clare, whatever it may seem to anybody else. He had always entertained as much hope of winning the star as of winning the woman; and as for an abstract question of beauty, he would have held that Venus herself could not have surpassed Eleanor Milbourne.
"Not so poor that you need go to Egypt in search of a fortune, however," said she, stopping short and looking at him keenly. "Confess," she added, "that you are about to expatriate yourself in this absurd fashion because Eleanor Milbourne means to marry Marston Brent." "Your acuteness has carried you too far," said he laughing, but not quite naturally.
It was impossible to say whether he shrank most from the pain of meeting Eleanor Milbourne with her accepted lover by her side, or from the thrill of disgust with which the mere thought of Mrs. Lancaster inspired him.
Milbourne was styled by Pope "the fairest of critics," only because he exhibited his own version of "Virgil" to be compared with Dryden's, which he condemned, and with which every reader had it not otherwise in his power to compare it. Young was surely not the most unfair of poets for prefixing to a lyric composition an "Essay on Lyric Poetry," so just and impartial as to condemn himself.
What was Eleanor Milbourne to him that he should banish himself on her account from the only pleasant house within a radius of twenty miles? A man should have some self-respect, he thought. He should not let every inquisitive fool see when and how and where a shaft has wounded him. Why should he not go? A heartache or two additional would not matter in Egypt. As for Mrs.
But if anybody here has a fancy for joining the army of the khedive, I may be able to give him a few important particulars." Nobody responded. The gentlemen seemed to prefer enlisting under Mrs. Lancaster's banner for the White Sulphur. The ladies shrugged their shoulders and said the idea was dreadful, Victor Clare sank back in the grass and addressed himself to Miss Milbourne.
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