Any fool, any bucolic squireen, could have given her a lift home on a cob.

He would like to do something which another person could _not_ do, something which would cheer her, console her, and at the same time place him in a magnanimous light.
We all long for an opportunity to act with generosity and tenderness to the one we love.

We need not trouble ourselves to seek for such an occasion, for though many things fail us in this life the opportunity so to act has never yet failed to arrive, and has never arrived alone, always hand in hand with some prosaic hideously difficult circumstance, which, if we are of an artistic temperament, may appear to us too ugly.
Wentworth had never wished to do anything for the gay little lady who, a few years ago, had crossed his path.

The principal subject of his cogitations about her had been whether she would be able to adapt herself to him and his habits, to understand his many-sided wayward nature, and to add permanently to his happiness; or whether, on the contrary, she might not prove a bar to his love of solitude, a drag on his soaring spirit.

So I think we may safely conclude that his feelings for her had not gone to breakneck length.