the coffin of that old free habit of
perfect confidence which had made the heaven of their life since they
had been man and wife.

He sat on for long, through the September evening, pondering, wrestling.
Was it simply inevitable, the natural result of his own act, and of her
antecedents, to which he must submit himself, as to any mutilation or
loss of power in the body? The young lover and husband rebelled--the
believer rebelled--against the admission. Probably if his change had
left him anchorless and forsaken, as it leaves many men, he would have
been ready enough to submit, in terror lest his own forlornness should
bring about hers. But in spite of the intellectual confusion which
inevitably attends any wholesale reconstruction of a man's platform of
action, he had never been more sure of God, or the Divine aims of the
world, than now; never more open than now, amid this exquisite Alpine
world, to those passionate moments of religious trust which are man's
eternal defiance to the iron silences about him. Originally, as we know,
he had shrunk from the thought of change in her corresponding to his
own; now that his own foothold was strengthening, his longing for a new
union was overpowering that old dread. The proselytizing instinct may
be never quite morally defensible, even as between husband and wife.
Nevertheless, in all strong, convinced, and ardent souls it exists, and
must be reckoned with.

At last one evening he was overcome by a sudden impulse which
neutralized for the moment his nervous dread of hurting her. Some little
incident of their day together was rankling, and it was borne in
upon him that almost any violent protest on her part would have been
preferable to this constant soft evasion of hers, which was gradually,
imperceptibly dividing heart from heart.

They were in a bare attic room at the very top of one of the huge
newly-built hotels which during the last twenty years have invaded all
the high places of Switzerland. The August, which had been so hot in
England, had been rainy and broken in Switzerland. But it had been
followed by a warm and mellow September, and the favorite hotels below a
certain height were still full. When the Elsmeres arrived at Les Avants
this scantily furnished garret out of which some servants had been
hurried to make room for them, was all that could be found. They,
however, liked it for its space and its view. They looked sideways from
their windows on to the upper e