eous. But
see--see, darling, what you have saved me from! Remember what he wanted
me to do. Oh--it was wrong and cruel of him. I shall never be able to
forgive him, just because I was so weak--just because I did listen."

"Ah, do forgive him--just because you were so strong that you never let
him guess that you were weak," said Holland. He was very sorry for Sir
Walter. And he was conscious, since he might not smile outwardly, of
smiling inwardly over the ruthlessness of women towards the man, loved
no longer, who has tarnished their image in their own eyes. The angel
held him fast in Paradise, but something in him, a mere sense of humour,
the humour of the outer world, perhaps, escaped her at moments, looked
down at her, at himself, at Paradise, and accepted comedy as well as
tragedy. It was only to these places of silence, loneliness and
contemplation that Kitty did not come.

She shared sorrow and joy. She guessed too well at the terrors; she
would be beside him, her very heart beating on his, through all the
valley of the shadow; he would be able to spare her nothing, and even in
death he would not be alone. And she was joy. The years of pining and
lassitude, the toying with danger, the furnace of affliction that, in
the library, had burned the dross from her soul, all had made another
woman of Kitty from his girl-bride of six years before. She was joy; she
knew how to make it, to give it. She surprised him continually with her
inventiveness in rapture. When fear came upon them, she folded it from
him with encircling arms. When fear passed, she seemed to lead him out
into the dew and sunlight of early morning and to show him new paths,
new flowers, new bowers of bliss. All artifice, all self-centred
dreaminess, all the littler charms, dropped from her. She was as candid,
as single-minded, as passionate as a newly created Eve, and she seemed
dowered with a magic power of diversity in simplicity. There was no
forethought or plan in her triumph over satiety. Like a flower, or an
Eve, she seemed alive with the instinctive impulse that grows from
change to change, from beauty to further beauty. Holland, summer-day
after summer-day, was conscious only of joy and sorrow; of these, and of
the still places where, sometimes, he seemed to hover above them. The
serpent of weariness still slept.

* * * * *

"Tell me, dearest," said Kitty one day--how they talked and talked about
themselves, rec