e suspense of his physicians. He had abandoned
himself to study, immersed himself in work; he was neither morbid nor an
amorist; and while he felt a stinging misery for ever in his heart, he
bore it with manly reticence, without complaint, without despair. Love,
in his case, had meant the idealisation of the whole of life--the life
of action and the life within the soul. It had transfigured the world,
lit up and illumined every dark corner, answered every turbulent doubt.
From the habit of this wholly mental emotion, he had lost, little by
little, the sense of the actual bodily existence of the woman herself.
It is true that he thought of her always as some one modestly beautiful,
of childish form, with a face like a water-nymph's--imperious, magical,
elusive, yet, whenever he found himself in her presence, she seemed
further away than when they were, in fact, apart. The kiss he had given
her on the day of their betrothal had been as strange, indefinable, and
irrealisable as the passing of one hour into the next. There had been
the time before he kissed her, there was the time afterwards, but the
transition had been so swift, and so little recognised, so inevitable,
that while it drew both their lives down deep into the wild, pitiless
surge of human feeling, she still remained more dearly and completely
his by intuition than when he held her--a true woman--in his arms. The
moral training of a lifetime, the unceasing, daily discipline of a mind
indulgent to others, but most severe with itself, had given him a
self-mastery in impulse and desire which, although the aspect of affairs
had changed, he could not easily, or even willingly, relax. His soul
drew back from its new privileges, sweet as they were--and he was too
honest to deny their overpowering sweetness--they seemed like the
desecration of a most sacred thought. Vainly he reasoned, vainly he
admitted the folly of such scruples. They remained. Asceticism is a
faithful quality. It is won by slow and painful stages, with bitter
distress and mortifying tears, but once really gained, the losing is
even harder than the struggle for its acquisition.

And so the young man found himself in that hard position when judgment
and prejudice stand opposed so utterly that victory either way must mean
a lasting regret. Perhaps he was not the first bridegroom who felt
loath, on the eve of his marriage, to change the delicate, almost
ethereal tenderness of betrothed lovers for the cl