The springs of his sensibility, hidden deep within him, were overflowing.

Often, as he bent over her hand and kissed it, he found himself in tears.
Upon Victoria, with all her impermeability, it was inevitable that such a companionship should have produced, eventually, an effect.

She was no longer the simple schoolgirl of two years since.

The change was visible even in her public demeanour.

Her expression, once "ingenuous and serene," now appeared to a shrewd observer to be "bold and discontented." She had learnt something of the pleasures of power and the pains of it; but that was not all.