, and there were all my
things."

"Never mind. Plenty more where they came from."

They paused in the doorway.

"Ha! This is the way," said he, "that a bride used to be brought into her
husband's house. They lifted her up so!" As he spoke he raised her high
in his strong arms. He was smiling, glorying in his strength.

And that was the way Mrs. Nevill Tyson was carried over the threshold of
the New Life. Or was it not rather her spirit that had lifted his? He
too, unworthy, soiled and shamed with sin, had been suffered to go with
her a little way. For one luminous perfect moment he stood face to face
with her in the mystic marriage-chamber of the soul; he heard--if it were
only for a moment--the unspeakable epithalamium; he saw incomprehensible
things.

It had needed some violent appeal to the senses, the spectacle or idea
of physical agony, to rouse him to that first passion of pity and
tenderness. Something like this he had felt once before, in the night
watch at Thorneytoft, when the wife he had wronged lay in the clutches of
life and death. But now, for the first time in his married life, he loved
her. Surely this was the way of peace.

Surely, surely. She lay down in her gladness and prayed the prayer of her
wedding-night: that God would make her a good wife. She did not pray that
Nevill might be made a good husband; of _his_ sins she had never spoken,
not even to her God.

As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, in the joy of his heart he thanked whatever gods
there might happen to be for his unconquerable soul.

CHAPTER XVII

THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL

Three weeks and they were still in London. If they could only have risen
up in the morning of the New Life, and turned their backs on that hateful
flat forever! But, seeing that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was tired out with her
journey from one room to the other, it looked as if the greater removal
was hardly to be thought of yet. The doctor was consulted.

"I must examine the heart," said the man of science.

He examined the heart.

"Better wait another week," he said, shortly. Brevity is the soul of
medical wit; he was a very eminent man, and time also was short.

So they waited a week, three weeks in fact. The delay gave Tyson time to
study the New Life in all its bearings. At first it seemed to him that he
too had attained. He was ready to fall in with all his wife's innocent
schemes. For his own part he looked forward to the coming change with
excitement that