forget utterly, was a greater victory, he said, than to
wake love in the heart of a girl, and would yield him a finer treasure,
a richer conquest. Only, pure as snow she must be--pure as the sun
himself! Paul Faber was absolutely tyrannous in his notions as to
feminine purity. Like the diamond shield of Prince Arthur, Knight of
Magnificence, must be the purity that would satisfy this lord of the
race who could live without a God! Was he then such a master of purity
himself? one so immaculate that in him such aspiration was no
presumption? Was what he knew himself to be, an idea to mate with his
unspotted ideal? The notion men have of their own worth, and of claims
founded thereon, is amazing; most amazing of all is what a man will set
up to himself as the standard of the woman he will marry. What the woman
may have a right to claim, never enters his thought. He never doubts the
right or righteousness of aspiring to wed a woman between whose nature
and his lies a gulf, wide as between an angel praising God, and a devil
taking refuge from him in a swine. Never a shadow of compunction crosses
the leprous soul, as he stretches forth his arms to infold the clean
woman! Ah, white dove! thou must lie for a while among the pots. If only
thy mother be not more to blame than the wretch that acts but after his
kind! He does hot die of self-loathing! how then could he imagine the
horror of disgust with which a glimpse of him such as he is would blast
the soul of the woman?' Yet has he--what is it?--the virtue? the pride?
or the cruel insolence?--to shrink with rudest abhorrence from one who
is, in nature and history and ruin, his fitting and proper mate! To see
only how a man will be content to be himself the thing which he scorns
another for being, might well be enough to send any one crying to the
God there may be, to come between him and himself. Lord! what a turning
of things upside down there will be one day! What a setting of lasts
first, and firsts last!

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE PARK AT NESTLEY.

Just inside the park, on a mossy knoll, a little way from the ancient
wrought-iron gate that opened almost upon the one street of Owlkirk, the
rector dug the foundation of his chapel--an oblong Gothic hall, of two
squares and a half, capable of seating all in the parish nearer to it
than to the abbey church. In his wife's eyes, Mr. Bevis was now an
absolute saint, for not only had he begun to build a chapel in his own
grounds