The effect of
those days in Petrograd when Marie Ivanovna had shown him that she
liked him, the thundering stupefying effect of that night when she had
accepted his love, must have caught his soul and changed it as glass
is caught by the worker and blown into shape and colour. There he was,
fashioned and purified, ready for her use. What would she make of
him? That she should make nothing of him at all was as incredible to
him as that there should not be, somewhere in the world, Polchester
town in Glebeshire county.
There had been with him, I think, from the first a fear that "it was
all too good to be true"--_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_. It is not
easy for any man, after thirty years' shy shrinking from the world, to
shake himself free of superstitions, and such terrors the quiet and
retired Polchester had bred in Trenchard's heart as though it had been
the very epitome of life at its lowest and vilest. It simply came to
this, that he refused to believe that Marie Ivanovna had been given to
him only to be taken away again.
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