d depth, and power of that
'grand impulsion,' which men call Love; and with these, a new humility
that forced him down upon his knees in a wordless ecstasy of
thanksgiving.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"They are one and one, with a shadowy third;
One near one is too far."
--Browning.

Quita was troubled.

A full week had elapsed since that day so strangely compounded of
rapture and dread; of matter-of-fact service, and shy, tender
intimacies that had seemed to set a seal on the completeness of their
reunion. Yet, in the days that followed, she had been increasingly
aware of a nameless something, an indefinable constraint between them,
which instinct told her would not have been there if conscience had
surrendered all along the line.

It was not his mere avoidance, after the first, of caresses congenial
to the opening phase of marriage that disconcerted her. Such emotional
reticence squared with her idea of the man. She would not have had him
otherwise. They were sure of one another; and in both natures passion
was proud and fastidious. It could thrive without much lip-service.
The undefined aloofness that troubled Quita was spiritual, rather than
physical. She was conscious of walls within walls, separating her from
his essential self; and behind these again of an unobtrusive reserve
force, whose power of endurance she could not estimate; because her
dealings with Michael's shallower nature had afforded her no experience
of a moral stability free from the warp of the personal equation. It
was as if some intangible part of him, over which she could establish
no hold, stood persistently afar off,--tormented, but immovable.

She could not know that the form of opium administered during his
illness had revived and strengthened temptation when he himself was
physically unfit to cope with it; that by her impulsive return to him,
at a critical moment, she was forcing him open-eyed toward a
catastrophe more lasting, more terrible for them both, than the initial
harm done by her rejection of him five years ago. Reserve and
self-disgust made speech on the subject seem a thing impossible; while
his mere man's chivalry shrank from allowing her to guess that by an
act of seeming reparation, she had run grave risk of putting real
reparation out of her power. Once only did the love that consumed him
break through the restraint he put upon himself in sheer self-defence.

It was the first day he had been allow