familiar sentiments on the essentials that make up the condition known
as happiness would neither convince, nor inspire, the powers of an
imagination which, with all its richness, was, apart from the purely
artistic faculty, analytical and foreboding. Self-doubt, however, has no
part in passion. Of the many miseries it may bring, this, perhaps the
worst of human woes, can never be in its train. Men in love--and women
also--may distrust all things and all creatures, but their own emotion,
like the storm, proves the reality of its force by the mischief it
wreaks. Robert's spirit, borne along by this vehemence of feeling,
caught the keen sweetness of the early air, not yet infected by the
day's traffic. His melancholy--the inevitable melancholy produced by
sustained thought on any subject, whether sublime or simple--was
dispelled. The Park, which was empty but for a few men on their way to
work, and runners anxious to keep in training, had its great trees
still beautiful from the lingering glance of summer; the wide and misty
stretches of grey grass were fresh in dew; the softness and
haze--without the gloom--of autumn were in the atmosphere. The pride of
love requited and the instincts of youth could not resist these spells
of nature. Robert remembered only that it was his wedding-day: that
every throb of his pulse and every second of time brought him nearer to
the supreme joy of his life and the supreme moment. He had never used
his nerves with bliss and tears, and he did not belong to the large army
of young gentlemen who own themselves proudly

"Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd....
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day."

This view of heroism was not possible to him, and he was too strong in
mind and body to pretend to it. The two things which affect a career
most profoundly are religion, or the lack of it, and marriage--or not
marrying; for these things only penetrate to the soul and make what may
be called its perpetual atmosphere. The Catholic Faith, which ignores no
single possibility in human feeling and no possible flight in human
idealism, produces in those who hold it truly a freshness of heart very
hard to be understood by the dispassionate critic who weighs character
by the newest laws of his favourite degenerate, but never by the
primeval tests of God. Robert, therefore, was thinking of his bride's
fa