iviette could hear the people coming out of church on the other side of
the garden wall. Their footsteps and their cheerful voices died away;
the bell rang for lunch; and she went in. But her life during that
morning and afternoon was wholly introspective. Knowing the full
circumstances of his situation as she knew them now--as she had never
before known them--ought she to make herself the legal wife of Swithin
St. Cleeve, and so secure her own honour at any price to him? such was
the formidable question which Lady Constantine propounded to her startled
understanding. As a subjectively honest woman alone, beginning her
charity at home, there was no doubt that she ought. Save Thyself was
sound Old Testament doctrine, and not altogether discountenanced in the
New. But was there a line of conduct which transcended mere
self-preservation? and would it not be an excellent thing to put it in
practice now?

That she had wronged St. Cleeve by marrying him--that she would wrong him
infinitely more by completing the marriage--there was, in her opinion, no
doubt. She in her experience had sought out him in his inexperience, and
had led him like a child. She remembered--as if it had been her fault,
though it was in fact only her misfortune--that she had been the one to
go for the license and take up residence in the parish in which they were
wedded. He was now just one-and-twenty. Without her, he had all the
world before him, six hundred a year, and leave to cut as straight a road
to fame as he should choose: with her, this story was negatived.

No money from his uncle; no power of advancement; but a bondage with a
woman whose disparity of years, though immaterial just now, would operate
in the future as a wet blanket upon his social ambitions; and that
content with life as it was which she had noticed more than once in him
latterly, a content imperilling his scientific spirit by abstracting his
zeal for progress.

It was impossible, in short, to blind herself to the inference that
marriage with her had not benefited him. Matters might improve in the
future; but to take upon herself the whole liability of Swithin's life,
as she would do by depriving him of the help his uncle had offered, was a
fearful responsibility. How could she, an unendowed woman, replace such
assistance? His recent visit to Greenwich, which had momentarily revived
that zest for his pursuit that was now less constant than heretofore,
should by ri