Life owed him, he thought, a compensation, and he would be restless and resentful until he found it.

He knew--or he seemed to know--where he should find it; but he hardly told himself, and thought of the thing under mental protest, as a man in want of money may think of certain funds that he holds in trust.
In his melancholy meditations the idea of something better than all this, something that might softly, richly interpose, something that might reconcile him to the future, something that might make one's tenure of life deep and zealous instead of harsh and uneven--the idea of concrete compensation, in a word--shaped itself sooner or later into the image of Mary Garland.
Very odd, you may say, that at this time of day Rowland should still be brooding over a plain girl of whom he had had but the lightest of glimpses two years before; very odd that so deep an impression should have been made by so lightly-pressed an instrument.

We must admit the oddity and offer simply in explanation that his sentiment apparently belonged to that species of emotion of which, by the testimony of the poets, the very name and essence is oddity.

One night he slept but half an hour; he found his thoughts taking a turn which excited him portentously.

He walked up and down his room half the night.