Three glasses of claret during dinner and one of port with his dessert was Mr. Challoner’s usual allowance of alcoholic fluid, and, as a rule, neither his sister nor Helen took any. But to-night, in honour of the occasion, a half-bottle of champagne, to drink a toast in which two names were coupled, made its unusual appearance, and the vicar proposed the health in a voice which shook a little with feeling.

“God bless you both, my dearest girl,” he said, and drained his glass.

Afterwards, as if to endorse the felicity of the occasion, the malignancy of the cards was abated, and Aunt Clara’s Patience “came out” twice before prayers without a semblance of cheating on her part. Why she cared to play at all, if she cheated, had long been to Helen an unanswerable riddle, and was so still. But, in her dry and passionless way, to get out without cheating was a satisfaction to Aunt Clara. She was pleased also with the engagement of her niece, but her comparative reticence on that, as on the subject of Patience (she had said only “Fancy, Sidney, Miss Milligan came out twice!”), was due not, as in her brother’s case, to excess of feeling, but to the inability to feel anything at all acutely. The performance of her duties in the house and in the parish had been for years a sufficient emotional diet; from other influences, like a freshly-vaccinated person in respect of smallpox, she was immune. She always{148} said “Good-night” the moment prayers were over, and did so on this occasion. But she kissed Helen twice. That corresponded to her observation to her brother about the Patience.

To-night, however, contrary to custom, the vicar lingered in the drawing-room instead of going back to his study, and, when her aunt was gone, Helen took this opportunity of getting her little confession made. He had beckoned her to the arm of the long, deep chair in which he was sitting, when she would naturally have followed her aunt upstairs, and took her hand in his, stroking it softly. Such a spontaneous caress was rare with him, and in spite of the enormity of her confession, she needed no large call on her courage to make it.

“There is one thing I want to tell you, father,” she said. “I hope you will not be very angry with me.”

Mr. Challoner pressed her hand gently. Now, as always, the confidence of his children was a thing immensely sweet to him, to get it unasked, pathetically so.

“What is it, dear?” he said. “I don’t think you need be afraid of that.”

“Do you remember this morning requesting Lord Yorkshire—Frank—not to smoke in the Room?” she asked.

“Yes, perfectly. And since I feel sure I know what you want to tell me, it did occur to me that you might, with a little courage, have asked him not to. You knew my feeling about it. But you have told me of your own accord, dear. So that is finished, quite finished.”

The temptation to say no more was extraordinarily strong, and to end this beautiful day quite happily with{149} every one—Aunt Clara had kissed her twice, which she usually only did on Christmas morning—was the childish impulse dominant in her. To-morrow she would deal with other things, one perfect pearl of a day would be hers,—an imperishable treasure. But the necessity of honesty, consecrated, as it were, by what had passed between her and Frank on the subject, conquered. For the last year she had occasionally smoked, and had never in the least desired to tell her father that she did. Yet now, somehow, perhaps because it was connected with him, she must. So she spoke.

“No, it is not quite finished,” she said. “I had been smoking, too.”

For a moment he almost failed to grasp this simple statement, then a school-master voice rapped out a question.

“You smoke?” he asked.

“Not often; not much,” she said, with the old childish awe of him suddenly returning.

“And who—— Did Martin teach you?” he asked, with an ironic emphasis on “teach,” at that fine word being put to such base uses.

“No; I asked him for a cigarette,” she said.

“And he gave it you?”

There was no reply necessary. He had dropped her hand, as if it had been a cigarette-end, but now he took it again.

“My dearest girl,” he said, “I do not want you for a moment to think that I make much out of a little; do not think that I regard it as morally wrong in any way. But think, Helen,—a girl like you smoking. Is it seemly? Is it not a horrid, a nasty habit? And in{150} the Room, too! There, there, don’t tremble, my dear. I am not angry.”

There was a moment’s pause.

“Let us dismiss it altogether, Helen,” he said. “You told me, anyhow, and I know it was hard for you to do that. But”—and he was father, responsible father, when he should have been friend—“but you knew my feeling about it. It was disobedient.”

All the time his heart was warmed by the thought that she had told him, yet his sense of duty, his responsibility towards his children, which was one of the most constant motives of his acts, made him say more. He did not want to preach, but he was incapable of not doing so.

“Yes, disobedient,” he said, “to what you knew I felt. And that Martin should give you a cigarette is as bad.”

“Ah, do not bring him into it,” she said. “I am stronger than Martin,—he had to give it me. Martin would always do what I asked him. Please do not write to him or speak to him about it.”

Then, at the thought of Martin, and of the constant, continual misunderstandings between him and her father, her own great happiness urged her to try to help him.

“I am much worse than Martin is, dear father,” she said; “much more disobedient, much,—‘The Mill on the Floss,’ for instance. I had been reading it.”

“And he had lent it you?” asked Mr. Challoner, quietly.

“No. I found it in his bedroom and took it. Oh, father—-{151}-“

The issues for each had deepened. The meaning of that exclamation was understood by him: it pleaded with him for Martin.

“I have always tried to be a good father to you both,” he said.

Then all that Helen had suppressed and striven not to have thought for years rose to the surface on this her first day of liberty. She had not let herself know how heavy the yoke had been till now, when her manumission was signed. But Martin still was in subjection. She stood up.

“I know that,” she said. “If I had not always known that I should not have cared. It is just that which makes it so sad. But we have both been afraid of you. We have concealed things from you because we were afraid of your displeasure. You know, Martin is awfully timid; he shrinks from what hurts. And we do not tell you everything even now.”

The thrill of pleasure that her unasked confidence had given him had pretty well died out. He felt also that there was something more coming.

“You or Martin?” he asked.

The tide was irresistible, sweeping her away. A thing which must be horribly painful to him had to be told her father to-day, to-morrow, or some time, and she suddenly knew that she must tell him now. Besides, here was a burden she could voluntarily bear for her lover, a pain, a difficult thing she could take on herself. And, woman all through, as she would have saved him anything from a toothache to a heartache, especially if the saving it from him meant the transference of it to her, she felt, in spite of the pain, an inward thrill and warmth at the thought that it would{152} be spared to Frank. A few minutes before, when Aunt Clara left the room, she would have gone too, if she had known that the little confession would lead on to this, but now the burning of her love, as when a furnace-door is thrown open, glowed with a whiteness that consumed all else.

“I, anyhow,” she said. “I have something which you must be told. And I choose to tell you instead of Frank.”

Her father got up also facing her. He was very grave, very still.

“Does it concern him?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it disgraceful?”

“No.”

He made one futile attempt to stop in the middle of the rapids into which he or she, he did not know which, had steered.

“Then, tell me nothing, Helen,” he said. “You say it is not disgraceful. That is quite sufficient for me when it comes from your mouth. I do not wish to be told either by him or you. There is no past that can be raked up—ah, I need not have asked you that. You would have turned from him with loathing if there had been that. For the rest I am satisfied. He has artistic tastes of which I have no knowledge, and with which no sympathy. He is honourable and of a great name, he is liked, respected; he is a man whom I would have chosen myself for you, and he has the interests and welfare of the church close to his heart——“

He stopped suddenly, arrested by the sudden whiteness of her face.{153}

“Or what?” he asked.

“He is not even a Christian,” said Helen, simply.

Mr. Challoner did not reply at once. The habit of tidiness in him, unconsciously asserting itself, led him to put square the case of cards which his sister had used for her Patience. Then he turned down with his foot the corner of the hearth-rug which Helen’s dress, as she walked to the fireplace, had disarranged. Indeed, it had distressed him for some time; it was easy to trip on it. Then he spoke.

“And did you know that when you promised to be his wife?” he asked, with a scrupulous desire to be absolutely fair.

“Yes,” said she.

“Then, what are his religious opinions?” asked he, still scrupulous. “Does he believe in God?”

“No.”

“And you knew that all along?”

“I knew it on the day when, I think, I began to love him,” she said.

A sudden, superficial flow of bitterness, just as a light breeze will ruffle the surface of some huge wave, passed over her father.

“For that reason?” he asked.

Helen looked at him in amazement.

“I did not know you could have asked me that,” she said.

“And I, too, have much to learn about my children,” said he.

Helen’s eye flashed back at him. She was afraid no longer. The talk she had had with Frank on that memorable Sunday afternoon she had put away like stored provisions; often since it had been food to her{154} thoughts, and it was now all eaten, digested, assimilated. The instinct of individualism had no doubt often been present to her mind before, but what he said then had made it blossom and fructify. He had said, in fact, perhaps no more than she had known, though without knowing she knew it; his words had been a taper to a gas-jet already turned on. Without the taper it might have continued to escape; the taper made flame of it. And in the light of it the figure “father” was shewn her as a man only, capable of using one vote, in opposition it might be to her own, but, however dear and intimate he was to her, and in spite of her parentage, education, and upbringing, he was still only somebody, not herself. And she, Helen, had to be herself.

“Yes; you are learning that they are people,” she said, in answer to his bitterness. “Martin and I are people. I must think for myself and feel for myself. Yes; I knew that Frank is what he is,—an atheist. And I love him.”

Mr. Challoner looked at her a moment with terrible, alien eyes, meeting her full gaze. Then he turned and went towards the door.

Instantly the daughter in her awoke.

“Father,” she cried, holding out her hands to him, “Father.”

But he passed out without turning, and she heard the door of his study opposite close behind him, and the click of a lock.

The finality, the sharpness of that click of well-oiled wards, brought home to the girl, even more than the bitter and burning words which had been said, what had happened, the unbridgeable breach that had opened{155} between herself and her father. For, even now, distraught as she was with the agitation of the scene, so that she felt almost physically sick, she knew that she had acted in compulsory obedience to an instinct which was irresistible; she could not call back into her own control the love she had given. Whatever else beckoned, that to her was the strongest call. And equally well-known to her was the instinct in obedience to which her father had acted. Dear as his children were to him, there was something infinitely dearer, that which from the tower of the church had pointed upwards into the clear, sunset sky. No assertion of individualism made its voice heard there; the one immutable love claimed all allegiances.

Infinitely shocked and distressed as he was, Mr. Challoner did not suffer during the next half-hour nearly as keenly as Helen, for the idea that she would not eventually—after pain and struggle, no doubt—see as he saw never entered his mind. Indeed, after a few minutes the emotion predominant in him was pity for her at the necessity of the rejection of the human love offered to and accepted by her. She would be led to the light—not for a moment did he doubt that—and the suffering would ennoble and not embitter her. Then, out of pity for her, compunction at what he had done rose within him. Again he had been harsh and peremptory; not even the sacred cause he championed could justify that nor excuse his lack of gentleness. He had left her in anger, anger as he now acknowledged to himself partly personal in its origin. So, before half an hour was passed, he unlocked his door, and going upstairs to her bedroom, tapped softly.{156}

Helen had had no more thought of going to bed than he, and she let him in at once.

“We did not say good-night, Helen,” he said. “We were both——“

She raised her eyes to him.

“Ah, don’t let us discuss it any more to-night,” she said.

“No, dear. I only wanted to say good-night to you, to—to say that I am sorry for leaving in the manner I did. You look very tired. Will you not go to bed.”

“Yes; soon perhaps.”

She kissed him, and stood silent a moment, fingering the lappel of his coat.

“If we did not care for each other it would be easier,” she said. “Poor father! Good-night, dear. Thank you for coming.”

 

It had been arranged that Frank should bring the motor over again next morning and drive Helen back to Fareham to lunch with Lady Sunningdale, and he made his appearance rather sooner than expected, having driven, as he acknowledged, a little over the regulation two miles an hour. Helen had heard the approach of wheels, and met him at the door. One glance at her face was enough to tell him that something, and what that was he easily guessed, had happened.

“Father is in,” she said; “he waited in on purpose to see you. Yes; he knows.”

“You told him? Well?”

“He said very little, but enough. Oh, Frank, it is very dreadful. He is my father. But all I said to you holds. He, you; that is what hurts so. It was awful telling him, too. But I had to.”{157}

“My darling, why?” he asked. “You should have left it to me.”

Her eye brightened.

“Ah, that was one of the reasons why I didn’t,” she said.

“Oh, Helen! But you look tired, knocked up.”

“That doesn’t much matter,” she said. “Go to see him now, dear. You will find me on the lawn when you have finished. And, remember, it all holds. It was never shaken, not for a moment, even last night. And he came to say good-night to me afterwards; poor, dear father! I have always envied him for his strength till now; but now it is just that which will make him suffer so horribly.”

Frank felt in his coat pocket, and took a note out of it.

“From Lady Sunningdale,” he said. “She is delighted, and is telling everybody how she managed and contrived it all from the beginning.”

Helen took the note.

“Go now, Frank,” she said. “I can think of nothing till this is over.”

She strolled out on to the lawn again, and sat down in the warm shade of the box-hedge to read Lady Sunningdale’s ecstatic and desultory raptures. The scene the evening before, followed by a very restless night, full of half-conscious sleep and wide-eyed awakenings, had so tired her that weariness had brought a sort of healing of its own, dulling the keenest edge of her capacity for suffering. Breakfast had been a meal of ghastly silence, broken only by noises of knives and forks, loud in the stillness. Her father had only addressed her directly once, and that to say that{158} he wished to see Lord Yorkshire when he arrived. Breakfast over, she had written to Martin to tell him all that had happened; then Frank had come.

All sorts of awful, impossible situations flapped like horrible bats about her as she waited. She pictured her father insulting her lover; she pictured Frank, stung by some intolerable taunt, striking him; she pictured, with dreadful vividness, a hundred things that could not possibly be. All round her hummed the myriad noises of the summer noon, and the myriad scents of the flower-garden, where still the industrious sweet-peas were prolific, mingled, and were wafted in web of fragrant smell round her. It was a day of high festival in sound and smell and light and colour, a day of a brilliance that had again and again been sufficient to make her half crazy with the pure joy of living and sight of joyous life so abundantly manifested. But this morning she was deaf and blind to the myriad-voiced noon; for in these last twenty-four hours there had come to her a happiness transcending all she had ever felt and a bitterness of sorrow, marching side by side, and inextricably mingled with it, that was as immeasurably more poignant than any she had ever known as her joy transcended all the other joys of her very happy years. Whatever might happen, life could never again be enjoyed by her with the insouciance of girlhood: some finger had touched her as she smiled and dreamed in her twenty years of sleep and had awakened her. And a voice had said, “Wake; you are a woman; you shall love and suffer.” Yet, even now, while she shrank and winced under the pain, some secret fibre of her being welcomed it. She—her essential self—was the richer for it; life at{159} last had touched her sad, bitter, imperfect, but admirable life. Like a plant, she had been moved suddenly out of the warm shelter of a green-house. Hereafter the sun might scorch her, the wind tear her, the frost wither her, the rain lash her, but she was to know what it was to be rooted in the great earth, to grow, with no shelter in between, upward towards the heavens.

All this was certainly happening to her, but as yet she guessed but a small part of it. All that her reverie, when she had read Lady Sunningdale’s letter, told her was that she was acutely unhappy because her father would suffer; and in some tremulous, a?rial way happy beyond all that she had ever guessed to be possible because she loved and was loved. The two feelings were inextricably intertwined; neither, as she knew them, could have existence without the other. And out of this tangled thicket of rose and thorn there emerged this new self of hers, in no selfish or egoistic mood, but very conscious, very vital, bleeding from the thorns, but breathing the inimitable odour of the roses.

A maid-servant with a message from the vicar roused her. Would she please to come into his study for a moment. She got up with a vague, dreadful sense that this had all happened before, but she could not remember the outcome, and as she walked across the lawn the terrible, impossible pictures again flashed through her head, like scenes of a magic-lantern staring out of blackness.

The aroma of tobacco as she opened the study door gave her a sudden, shallow thrill of comfort. But this was scarcely endorsed by the next impression.{160} Mr. Challoner, always courteous, had no doubt suggested one of his excellent cigars, and Frank had accepted it. But the good-fellowship tacitly implied by the act was here omitted. The vicar stood with his back to the fireplace, flinty-faced; Frank sat in a big chair drawn close to the writing-table, the chair in which times without number Helen and Martin had sat together looking at Bible pictures after tea on Sunday. All the furniture of the study, the aromatic smell of leather bindings that hung there, the uncompromising tidiness of it, its orderly severity, the picture of the Roman forum, the glass paper-weight on the table, brought a sudden rush of associations into the girl’s mind now that she saw Frank there too; they were all so closely knit into the fabric of her life, so intimately suggestive of that stern, tall figure by the fireplace. And somewhere far away back in her brain her own voice, in a little childish pipe, whispered to Martin, “Papa’s cross about something. Is it you or me?”

She took a seat in silence, and the silence lengthened ominously. Frank was looking at her with a quiet, level gaze, full of love and full of pity, and she turned her eyes away, fearing that she would scream with tears or laughter if she allowed herself to look at him. And the voice that broke the silence was quiet and level also; the whole thing was deplorably well-bred. Insults, violence, all that she had pictured to herself, would have been a relief, a safety-valve for the bursting pressure that she knew existed beneath. But as yet there was none.

“I have sent for you, Helen,” said her father, “to choose.” He paused a moment. “Lord Yorkshire is{161} on the one side,” he said, “I am on the other. We have settled it so.”

“That is not quite fairly stated,” said Frank, in the tone a man might use if he demurred to some argument in a discussion in which he was not really interested.

Mr. Challoner’s face grew a shade paler.

“Did you say ‘fairly’?” he asked.

The deadly quietness of this suddenly frightened the girl. That was a tone in his voice she knew and dreaded.

“Father,” she said, “father.”

They neither of them took any notice of her, and Frank answered in the same gentle, objecting manner.

“You say ‘we settled it,’” he said. “I had nothing to do with it. You merely told me what you were going to do. That is why I used the word ‘fairly.’”

Mr. Challoner considered this for a moment.

“I see your point,” he said. “That is so.”

Then he turned to Helen.

“So choose,” he said. “I settled it so.”

Helen looked at Frank a moment and stood up, love streaming round her in triumphant flood, bearing her away.

“I have chosen,” she said. “You know it.”

Then, even in that moment, when she felt so strong, when her love was to her like a draught of wine or meat to the hungry, her strength utterly failed her, and she buried her head on the cushions of the sofa where she had been sitting and burst into hopeless, hysterical sobbing. She was not capable of more; all had given way, and she lay helpless, sobbing, sobbing, as if to sob her heart out.{162}

But four hands were busy about her, and as the stress of her seizure began to leave her, she heard two voices, for the moment one. And one said, “Helen darling,” and the other, “Helen dear;” and one said, “If you would be so kind, Lord Yorkshire, there is some water on the table;” and the other said, “Helen, would you like to drink a little water?”

For two men in nature, in sympathy, in religion poles apart were bound together for a moment in the necessity divine and human of comforting the weak, of giving help to a sufferer. She who suffered was loved by them both, and though the distance of fifty poles could not span the difference between their ways of love, that was sufficient.

For myriads are the ways of approaching the throne where all love dwells. From east and west and north and south those myriad ways converge and meet. But at present east and west, being human, and thinking that they were going in opposite ways, could not foretell the meeting. But the Centre knew.

By degrees she came to herself again, and one said, “Some other time,” and the other, “Not again now, Helen.” So of the three she was the only one who was resolved to go on, to have this ghastly spiritual surgery finished. Though she had chosen, she knew there was more that had to be said.

She cast one glance at her father, but her physical weakness over, his pity, she saw, was over also. A gulf immeasurable by leagues had opened between them, and though not even yet did he despair that they would be forever disunited, it was she who must come to him. From the firm rock on which he stood he knew, so he believed, that he would never stir a step.{163}

She pushed back her hair from her forehead.

“I don’t know why I did that,” she said. “It was stupid of me. Give me a minute.”

She got up, still a little unsteadily, and played with the pens in the tray on the writing-table, recovering herself. Then she turned suddenly to her father.

“Father,” she said, “you can’t mean what you say. How can I choose between you? What are you asking me to do? What do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I say,” he answered, with the same dreadful quietness. That which had not seemed possible to him last night, that she would really choose as she had chosen, had become more than possible. “You choose between us. Are there words in which I can make that clearer? If you choose me, you say good-bye to Lord Yorkshire here and now. If you choose him, you are to understand that you cease to be my daughter. I will not be at your wedding; I will not see you afterwards. You shall not be married from this house, nor, if I could help it, should you be married in this church.”

Then suddenly the quietness of the scene was shattered. As if by a sudden flash of lightning, all that Helen’s choice implied, her rejection not of him alone, but her rejection of all in the world that he held sacred, was made dazzlingly clear to him. At that his self-control gave way, and as his voice rose louder and louder, he beat with his clenched hand on the edge of the marble chimney-piece, so that the knuckles bled.

“Understand what you are doing,” he said, “and let me tell you, so that there can be no mistake. You will promise to love, honour, and obey an atheist, an{164} infidel, one who denies God and his Christ. You will have to say you do this according to God’s holy ordinance. That from you, in church, Helen, and a lie. It cannot be by His ordinance, for by your act you turn your back on the faith that has been yours from childhood till now, on all you have believed to be sacred. And what of the end? What of the life to which this is but a prelude? What of him, your husband, then? He that believeth not shall be damned. I would—I would sooner see you in your coffin than standing by the altar with this man. I would sooner see you his mistress——“

His passion, springing though it did from his own intense and fervent Christianity, had suddenly shot out into a bitter and poisonous blossom, and as that flared through the room, he paused a moment and looked at her as she stood before him in the beautiful whiteness of her girlhood. Her physical weakness had altogether passed, and except that she took one step back from him in involuntary disgust and shrinking, you would have said she was listening with quiet, incredulous wonder to some tale that did not concern her. But as he paused, hardly yet knowing what he had said, knowing, in fact, only that no words could be strong enough to express the intensity of his conviction, she turned from him.

“Come, Frank,” she said; “let us go.”

Frank also had risen with a sudden flush on his face at those intolerable words, an answer springing to his lips, and moved quickly towards her with some instinct of protecting her. But her tone checked him, and he followed her to the door. She had already opened it, without further speech or looking back,{165} when her father’s voice, scarcely audible and broken and trembling, stopped her.

“Helen,” he said, “indeed I did not think or know what I said. But, my dearest, what are you doing? What are you doing? For Christ’s sake, Helen, who died for you.”

Frank had passed out. Whatever more took place between them was not for him to hear. Then the door closed behind him, leaving father and daughter alone.

“For Christ’s sake, Helen,” he said again.

She came back to the hearth-rug where he stood.

“Oh, father,” she said, and paused. That was all the reproach he was ever to hear from her. “You are making it very hard for me.”

“Yes, I am making it as hard as I can. I am bound by my duty to God to do that. If I knew how to make it harder, I would.”

“You cannot. You have said all that can be said. And I have nothing more to say. Let me go now.”

She kissed him gently.

“Poor father!” she said, and left him.

 

Mr. Challoner stood long where he was when she had gone. Never before perhaps in his whole life had another will come so actively and stubbornly into collision with his, and never before certainly had he felt so overwhelmingly a sense of spiritual desolation. Eager and strenuous all through, it was in the truths of the Christian faith that he found the incentive of his life, from it sprang all the earnestness and deep sense of duty in the man, to it was every effort and deed of his dedicated.{166}

“But what have I done,” he half moaned to himself, “that this should come to my house, and to one for whose faith and upbringing I have to answer? Oh, Lord, if it is through any fault of mine, let me learn for what deadly sin this punishment is sent!”

Indeed, he had spoken no more than the truth, bitter and brutal though the truth was, when he told Helen that he would rather have seen her in her coffin than by the altar with her lover. And now he took no account of his personal sorrow; the yearning that she should accept her father’s wish and guidance as such was non-existent in him, killed by the stronger motive. All his personal relations with her of trust and affection, which to the best of his power he had built up for years, were voiceless now,—simply he strove for a soul—and that dear to him—in danger imminent and awful. The rigid Puritan note was here, and he would sooner have mated her with a thief or an adulterer, since such might repent and be saved, than with a reasoned atheist.

Then in a horror of great darkness he questioned his own spirit. “How had he failed?” and again, “How had he failed?” Never had precious plant been more hedged about from frost or untimely blighting of March winds than had his daughter been folded from all that could conceivably have stunted or weakened the one true growth. From the time when her lips were wet with a mother’s milk God counsels, verse by verse and line by line, had been the guides and counsellors of her life. What had he left undone that he could have done? Had any remissness of his own hindered growth where it should have helped? He searched the years for his fault, but among all his{167} failures and weaknesses and harshnesses he could not find that even for a day had he let anything else take precedence of the greatest and the only thing in the world.

And now at the end she would mate with an infidel, a man, according to his idea, whose intimacy was more to be shunned than that of a leper’s or of one who was tainted with some deadly and contagious disease. That, at any rate, could only kill the body; but Helen had chosen as the friend and companion of her nights and days one whose soul was sick with a more fatal disease, the end of which, ordained and appointed of God, was eternal death. It was too hideous to be credible, it was too hideous to be conceivably just. And the fact that he could think that gives the measure of his soul’s anguish.

God sets a limit to human misery: for it happens that the tortured brain, tired with suffering, lapses into a state of semi-sensibility; or again, since one cannot feel pain on account of another unless the other is dear,—the pain felt varying, indeed, in proportion to the affection felt,—the joy of love is always mingled with it. It was so now with Mr. Challoner. Had he not have been Helen’s father, had he not loved her, he would have cared less. But she was his daughter, his own girl, whose sweetness had all her life made sunshine in his home. He had said an intolerable thing to her, and for reproach she had still given him gentleness. In the keenness of his own suffering he had forgotten hers; he had forgotten even, except for that moment when she had broken down, that she must be suffering. So he went out after her.

She was standing at the door with her lover, and{168} he went straight up to them. Even the sight of Frank there gave him no pause.

“It has been a dreadful morning for us all,” he said, “and selfishly I had forgotten that others beside myself were unhappy. God knows what is in store for us all, but we can do no good by being bitter, as I have been. Let us,—yes, you, too, Lord Yorkshire,—let us all join hands a moment. We are His children, are we not? We——“

His mouth quivered, no more words would come, and they stood there a moment, all three hands clasped. Then, feeling that his self-control was utterly giving way, he left them, and went back to his empty room.