his wife's conduct, raising again
a little way the pride she had trampled in the dust.

Her uncle, Father Arlworth, helped Domini by his support and counsel in
this critical period of her life, and Lord Rens in time ceased from the
endeavour to carry his child with him as companion in his tragic journey
from love and belief to hatred and denial. He turned to the violent
occupations of despair, and the last years of his life were hideous
enough, as the world knew and Domini sometimes suspected. But though
Domini had resisted him she was not unmoved or wholly uninfluenced by
her mother's desertion and its effect upon her father. She remained a
Catholic, but she gradually ceased from being a devout one. Although
she had seemed to stand firm she had in truth been shaken, if not in
her belief, in a more precious thing--her love. She complied with the
ordinances, but felt little of the inner beauty of her faith. The effort
she had made in withstanding her father's assault upon it had exhausted
her. Though she had had the strength to triumph, at the moment, a
partial and secret collapse was the price she had afterwards to pay.
Father Arlworth, who had a subtle understanding of human nature, noticed
that Domini was changed and slightly hardened by the tragedy she had
known, and was not surprised or shocked. Nor did he attempt to force
her character back into its former way of beauty. He knew that to do
so would be dangerous, that Domini's nature required peace in which to
become absolutely normal once again after the shock it had sustained.

When Domini was twenty-one he died, and her safest guide, the one who
understood her best, went from her. The years passed. She lived with her
embittered father; and drifted into the unthinking worldliness of the
life of her order. Her home was far from ideal. Yet she would not marry.
The wreck of her parents' domestic life had rendered her mistrustful of
human relations. She had seen something of the terror of love, and could
not, like other women, regard it as safety and as sweetness. So she put
it from her, and strove to fill her life with all those lesser things
which men and women grasp, as the Chinese grasp the opium pipe, those
things which lull our comprehension of realities to sleep.

When Lord Rens died, still blaspheming, and without any of the
consolations of religion, Domini felt the imperious need of change. She
did not grieve actively for the dead man. In his last years they