e race; and to think of a woman in such a
way is to feel a rightful emotion and a rightful desire; anything else
makes emotion the end instead of the result and is corrupting, I'm sure
of it."

"You have thought it all out, haven't you"; Lady Channice steadied her
voice to say. There was panic rising in her, and a strange anger made
part of it.

"I've had to, as I said," he replied. "I'm anything but self-controlled
by nature; already," and Augustine looked calmly at his mother, "I'd
have let myself go and been very dissolute unless I'd had this ideal of
my own honour to help me. I'm of anything but a saintly disposition."

"My dear Augustine!" His mother had coloured faintly. Absurd as it was,
when the reality of her own life was there mocking her, the bald words
were strange to her.

"Do I shock you?" he asked. "You know I always feel that you _are_ a
saint, who can hear and understand everything."

She blushed deeply, painfully, now. "No, you don't shock me;--I am only
a little startled."

"To hear that I'm sensual? The whole human race is far too sensual in my
opinion. They think a great deal too much about their sexual
appetites;--only they don't think about them in those terms
unfortunately; they think about them veiled and wreathed; that's why we
are sunk in such a bog of sentimentality and sin."

Lady Channice was silent for a long time. They had left the garden, and
walked along the little path near the sunken wall at the foot of the
lawn, and, skirting the wood of sycamores, had come back to the broad
gravel terrace. A turmoil was in her mind; a longing to know and see; a
terror of what he would show her.

"Do you call it sin, that blinded love? Do you think that the famous
lovers of romance were sinners?" she asked at last; "Tristan and
Iseult?--Abelard and Heloise?--Paolo and Francesca?"

"Of course they were sinners," said Augustine cheerfully. "What did they
want?--a present joy: purely and simply that: they sacrificed everything
to it--their own and other people's futures: what's that but sin? There
is so much mawkish rubbish talked and written about such persons. They
were pathetic, of course, most sinners are; that particular sin, of
course, may be so associated and bound up with beautiful
things;--fidelity, and real love may make such a part of it, that people
get confused about it."

"Fidelity and real love?" Lady Channice repeated: "you think that they
atone--if they make part of an illi