ve adjunct of a great deal of his verse, and he flushed
hotly to remember lines that now appeared as damnable insincerities with
which he had allowed his pen to play. All that piety of hers he had sung
so prettily was real and possessed an intrinsic power to injure him, so
that what he had patronized and encouraged could rise up and pit itself
deliberately against him. Pauline actually believed in her religion,
believed in it to the extent of dishonoring their love to appease the
mumbo-jumbo. That something so monstrously inexistent could have any
such power was barely comprehensible, and yet here he was faced with
what easily might prove to be a force powerful enough to annihilate
their love. He remembered how in reading of Christina Rossetti's
renunciation of a lover who did not believe as she believed, he had
thought of the incident as a poet's exaggeration. And it might well have
happened. Now, indeed, he could see why she was so much the greatest
poetess of them all; her faith had been real. Lines from that Sonnet of
sonnets came back to him, broken lines but full of dread:

I love ... God the most;
Would lose not Him but you, must one be lost:

And if Pauline should speak so to him, if Pauline should disown him at
the bidding of her phantom gods? How the thought swept into oblivion all
his pitiful achievement, all his fretful emotions set down in rhyme.
Either he must convince her that she was affrighted by vain fancies or
he must bow before this reality of belief and seek humbly the truth
where she discovered it. Yet if he took that course it held no pledge of
faith for him. Shamefacedly and scarcely able to bear even the
thorn-tree's presence, Guy knelt down and prayed that he might be given
Pauline's single heart. The song of the innumerable larks rose into the
crystalline, but all the prayers tumbled down from that stuffy pavilion
of sky. The moment that the first emotional aspiration was thus defeated
Guy was only conscious of his lapse into superstition, and, furious with
the surrender, he went walking over the downs in a determination to
shake Pauline's faith at whatever the cost temporarily to the beautiful
appearance of their love.

He wrote that evening in a fine frenzy of declamation against God,
affirming in his verse the rights of man; but on reading the lines
through next morning they seemed like the first vapors of adolescence;
and when he turned for consolation to Shelley he f