to what he should do. One phrase
of hers which had passed almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was
now ringing in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just within his
reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as strong as it was
intangible. '_We are not here only to be happy_,' she had said to him,
with a look of ethereal exaltation worthy of her namesake of Alexandria.
The words had slipped from her involuntarily in the spiritual tension of
her mood. They were now filling Robert Elsmere's mind with a tormenting,
torturing bliss. What could they mean? What had her paleness, her
evident trouble and weakness meant, but that the inmost self of hers was
his, was conquered; and that, but for the shadowy obstacle between them,
all would be well?

As for the obstacle in itself, he did not admit its force for a moment.
No sane and practical man, least of all when that man happened to be
Catherine Leyburn's lover, could regard it as a binding obligation upon
her that she should sacrifice her own life and happiness to three
persons, who were in no evident moral straits, no physical or pecuniary
need, and who, as Rose incoherently put it, might very well be rather
braced than injured by the withdrawal of her strong support.

But the obstacle of character--ah, there was a different matter! He
realised with despair the brooding scrupulous force of moral passion to
which her lonely life, her antecedents, and her father's nature working
in her had given so rare and marked a development. No temper in the
world is so little open to reason as the ascetic temper. How many a
lover and husband, how many a parent and friend, have realised to their
pain, since history began, the overwhelming attraction which all the
processes of self-annihilation have for a certain order of minds!
Robert's heart sank before the memory of that frail indomitable look,
that aspect of sad yet immovable conviction with which she had bade him
farewell. And yet, surely--surely under the willingness of the spirit
there had been a pitiful, a most womanly weakness of the flesh. Surely,
now memory reproduced the scene, she had been white--trembling: her
hand had rested on the moss-grown wall beside her for support. Oh,
why had he been so timid? why had he let that awe of her, which her
personality produced so readily, stand between them? why had he not
boldly caught her to himself, and, with all the eloquence of a
passionate nature, trampled on her