possibly
not look at it in the same light. She took for granted that he would
share her attitude towards her father as he had shared her adoration for
her mother. It was all part of her entire trust in Rendel, and the
simple directness with which she approached the problems of life. She
had, before her marriage, expressed an earnest wish, which Rendel
understood as a condition, that even if her father did not wish to live
with them, she might share in his life and watch over him, and Rendel
had accepted the condition and promised that it should be as she wished.
But it is obviously not the actual making of a promise that is the
difficulty. If it were possible when we pledge ourselves to a given
course for our imagination to show us in a vision of the future the
innumerable occasions on which we should be called upon to redeem, each
time by a conscious separate effort, that lightly given pledge of an
instant, the stoutest-hearted of us would quail at the prospect. Rendel
looked back with a sigh to those days, that seemed already to have
receded into a luminous distance, when Rachel, alone with him in
Scotland, with no divided allegiance, had given herself up, heart and
mind, to the new happiness, the new existence, that was opening before
her.

The danger of pouring life while it is still fluid into the wrong mould,
of letting it drift and harden into the wrong shape, is an insidious
peril which is not sufficiently guarded against. It is easy enough to
say, Begin as you mean to go on; but the difficulty is to know exactly
the moment when you begin, and when the point of going on has been
arrived at; and of drifting gradually into some irremediable course of
action from which it is almost impossible to turn back without
difficulty and struggle. There had been a feeling that everything was
somehow temporary during those first days at Cosmo Place, which extended
into the weeks. Sir William held as a principle, and was quite genuine
in his intention when he said it, that young people ought to be left to
themselves. He would not, therefore, take up his abode under their roof,
but still that he should do so eventually was felt by all concerned as a
vague possibility which prevented in the young household a sense of
having finally and comfortably settled down. Indeed, as it was, it was
perhaps more unsettling to Rachel, and therefore to her husband, to have
Sir William coming and going than it would have been to have him
actu