h the portrait
was in the palm of his hand, the battle of the imagination ceased
and she was fairer for him than if her foot had continued pure of its
erratic step: fairer, owing to the eyes he saw with; he had shaken
himself free of the exacting senses which consent to the worship of
women upon the condition of their possessing all the precious and the
miraculous qualities; among others, the gift of an exquisite fragility
that cannot break; in short, upon terms flattering to the individual
devotee. Without knowing it he had done it and got some of the upholding
strength of those noblest of honest men who not merely give souls to
women--an extraordinary endowment of them--but also discourse to them
with their souls.

Patrick accepted Adiante's husband: the man was her husband. Hideous
(for there was no combating her father's painting of him), he was almost
interesting through his alliance:--an example of how much earth the
worshipper can swallow when he is quite sincere. Instead of his going
under eclipse, the beauty of his lady eclipsed her monster. He believed
in her right to choose according to her pleasure since her lover was
denied her. Sitting alone by his fire, he gazed at her for hours and
bled for Philip. There was a riddle to be answered in her cutting
herself away from Philip; he could not answer it; her face was the
vindication and the grief. The usual traverses besetting true lovers
were suggested to him, enemies and slanders and intercepted letters. He
rejected them in the presence of the beautiful inscrutable. Small
marvel that Philip had loved her. 'Poor fellow' Patrick cried aloud, and
drooped on a fit of tears.

The sleep he had was urgently dream-ridden to goals that eluded him and
broadened to fresh races and chases waving something to be won which
never was won, albeit untiringly pursued amid a series of adventures,
tragic episodes; wild enthusiasm. The whole of it was featureless,
a shifting agitation; yet he must have been endowed to extricate a
particular meaning applied to himself out of the mass of tumbled
events, and closely in relation to realities, for he quitted his bed
passionately regretting that he had not gone through a course of drill
and study of the military art. He remembered Mr. Adister's having said
that military training was good for all gentlemen.

'I could join the French Foreign Legion,' he thought.

Adiante was as beautiful by day as by night. He looked. The riddle of
he