e all joys of the
senses less and less. There can be no high order of morality without
this sense of responsibility, for when a man feels he is moulding his
own character, forming, as it were, fresh links in the chain of
endurance, adding by every act and thought and word to that personality
he is bound to confront as _himself_, to re-inhabit as himself, and to
judge as himself, then life rises into an importance that words cannot
convey, but which the soul alone recognises and feels in those better
moments that are mercifully granted to each and all of us.

So Julian Estcourt took up his burden--saddened, aged, embittered
perhaps, but not one whit more inclined to squander the gifts of life or
the fruits of discipline than he had been in his dreamy, studious youth.

He neither sought distraction in evil and dissipated courses, nor death
by any of those foolhardy and rash exploits which have far too often
been glorified as "courage" or "pluck."

He was graver, more reticent, more studious than of yore, and he found
his reward, though few even of his intimate associates were aware of his
abnormal gifts, or his superior knowledge. Such was the man who, still
in the prime of life's best years, still with thirst unslaked for that
one divine draught of love which, once at least, is offered to mortal
lips, stood now in the soft December moonlight by the side of the woman
he had worshipped for long in secret and in pain, and cried aloud in
triumph to his heart, "At last happiness is mine!"

His whole consciousness was pervaded with a sense of ecstasy that seemed
to make all past pain and regret sink into utter insignificance. To
stand there by her side, to drink in that wonderful beauty of face and
form, was a joy that brought absolute forgetfulness of everything
outside and apart from its new and magical acquisition. The world was
forgotten. Even the possibility of a formal and imperative ceremonial
by which his newly-won treasure must be secured to himself at last,
barely flashed across his consciousness. He did not trouble himself to
put it into words. He listened to the brief disjointed fragments of her
speech--fragments which gave a dim picture of her life in these empty
years of division. Now and then he spoke of himself. She listened.
Once she turned to him with an impulse of tenderness strange in one so
cold and self-possessed.

"Ah!" she cried, softly, "I have made you suffer... but it was not my
will...