hese thoughts started up spectre-like in
Roden's mind, he began to think of death.

Not of the suicide's death. Oh no. Putting it on the lowest grounds,
such an act would be a feebleness, an imbecility, such as found no part
within his nature; for it would be a concession to the unutterably
contemptible tenet that there existed such a reality as love. Not in
him was it to afford such a triumph as that to his enemies, let alone to
her who, when tried, had been found so pitiably wanting. No, it was
death in its natural order that now filled his mind. Would all things
be at rest then? or would it be indeed, as the jarring tongues of
striving sects and hair-splitting 'ologies all agreed--the one point on
which they did agree--that that death, not so very formidable in itself,
was only to open the gate of woe, endless, unutterable, to those who had
eaten their full share of the bread of affliction in life--namely, the
vast bulk of human kind?

He passed his hand over his eyes. Had it all been a dream? No, no! and
yet in a way it had; but a dream from which he had now thoroughly
awakened. Nevertheless, as he paced his horse steadily on, mile after
mile over the glowing, sunlit landscape, the torment which seethed the
soul of this outwardly cool and imperturbable wayfarer might have moved
the pity of angels and men. For strive and reason as he would, the love
which burnt within his heart flamed more strongly than it had ever
done--yet now he had renounced it--and its object he would never again
behold in life.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.

"O LOVE, THY DAY SETS DARKLING."

The same proud, fearless strength of nature which had allowed Mona to
give herself up so unreservedly to this wonderful, all-absorbing love,
once she were sure of it, now enabled her to suffer and make no sign.
She was not one to wear the willow ostentatiously. Suffield, indeed,
was lost in amazement over what he had termed her cool way of taking it.
His wife, however, who could see below the surface, knew what a
smouldering volcano this "coolness" covered. Sadly, too, she recalled
her own words, "Wait until it comes, Mona, and then tell me how
enjoyable you find it." Well, "it" had come, and could anything be a
more disastrous, more complete wreck? She would watch her relative with
a kind of awed wonder; for Mona never made direct allusion to anything
that had gone before. A trifle graver, more reserved perhaps; otherwise
as serene, as impe