e of dismissal. He bowed, passed her,
and the door shut.

* * * * *

For nearly an hour afterwards Elsmere wandered blindly and aimlessly
through the darkness and silence of the park.

The sensitive optimist nature was all unhinged, felt itself wrestling in
the grip of dark implacable things, upheld by a single thread above that
moral abyss which yawns beneath us all, into which the individual life
sinks so easily to ruin and nothingness. At such moments a man realises
within himself, within the circle of consciousness, the germs of all
things hideous and vile. '_Save for the grace of God_,' he says to
himself, shuddering, 'save only for the grace of God----'

Contempt for himself, loathing for life and its possibilities, as he had
just beheld them; moral tumult, pity, remorse, a stinging
self-reproach--all these things wrestled within him. What, preach to
others, and stumble himself into such mire as this? Talk loudly of love
and faith, and make it possible all the time that a fellow human
creature should think you capable at a pinch of the worst treason
against both?

Elsmere dived to the very depths of his own soul that night. Was it all
the natural consequence of a loosened bond, of a wretched relaxation of
effort--a wretched acquiescence in something second best? Had love been
cooling? Had it simply ceased to take the trouble love must take to
maintain itself? And had this horror been the subtle inevitable Nemesis?

All at once, under the trees of the park, Elsmere stopped for a moment
in the darkness, and bared his head, with the passionate reverential
action of a devotee before his saint. The lurid image which had been
pursuing him gave way, and in its place came the image of a new-made
mother, her child close within her sheltering arm. Ah! it was all plain
to him now. The moral tempest had done its work.

One task of all tasks had been set him from the beginning--to keep his
wife's love! If she had slipped away from him, to the injury and moral
lessening of both, on his cowardice, on his clumsiness, be the blame!
Above all, on his fatal power of absorbing himself in a hundred outside
interests, controversy, literature, society. Even his work seemed to
have lost half its sacredness. If there be a canker at the root, no
matter how large the show of leaf and blossom overhead, there is but the
more to wither! Of what worth is any success, but that which is grounded
deep on the