ing the fulness of existence--its pains, vanities,
pleasures, cares, sorrows,--with a fighter's courage and the fortitude
of an immortal soul.

As he walked along toward Vigo Street in the cold, dark autumn morning,
he felt more than able to hold his own against all adversaries. And this
was not the insolence of conceit, but the just strength which comes from
a vigorous conscience and perfect health. A soldier counts it no shame,
but rather an honour, to die in battle, so Robert, surveying the chances
before him, stood determined, in every event, to endure until the end,
to fight until the end, to maintain his ground until the end. But if he
had put sentiment from his path, it was not so easily weeded from his
constitution, and while he was able to persuade himself that his
renunciation of all passionate love--except as a bitter-sweet
memory--was complete, he had to realise that the old grudge against
Castrillon had grown into a formidable, unquenchable, over-mastering
hatred. Where this strange obsession was concerned, no religious or
other consideration availed in the least. Bit by bit, hour by hour, the
feeling had grown, deriving vigour from every source, every allusion,
and every experience. The books he read, the conversations he heard, the
people he met--all seemed to illuminate and justify, in some mysterious
way, his enmity against Castrillon. He may have believed that he was
resigned to his ill-luck in love, but a sense that he had been defrauded
haunted his thoughts always, and the longing to square his account with
destiny was less a wish than a mute instinct. How great had been the
temptation to defy all laws--human and Divine--where Brigit Parflete was
in question, no one can know. In getting the better of it, the motive
had not been, it must be confessed, the fear of punishment here or
hereafter. This would not be a true history, nor a reasonable one, if it
were not acknowledged that much of the victory in that situation had
been due to the woman's youth and candid, sunny nature. No passion--far
less a guilty one--he thought, could have had a place in that childlike
heart. She was Pompilia--not Juliet, because, like the more ill-starred
heroine, she had met sorrow before she met love, and the strong emotion
which comes first in a young life makes the deep, the ineffaceable
impression on its character. She had the strength to suffer undeserved
woe, but the penalties of defiance and disobedience would surely