, a stinging
self-reproach--all these things wrestled within him. What, preach to
others, and stumble himself into such mire as this? Talk loudly of
love and faith, and make it possible all the time that a fellow human
creature should think you capable at a pinch of the worst treason
against both?

Elsmere dived to the very depths of his own soul that night. Was it all
the natural consequence of a loosened bond, of a wretched relaxation of
effort--a wretched acquiescence in something second best? Had love been
cooling? Had it simply ceased to take the trouble love must take to
maintain itself? And had this horror been the subtle inevitable Nemesis?

All at once, under the trees of the park, Elsmere stopped for a moment
in the darkness, and bared his head, with the passionate reverential
action of a devotee before his saint. The lurid image which had been
pursuing him gave way, and in its place came the image of a new-made
mother, her child close within her sheltering arm. Ah! it was all plain
to him now. The moral tempest had done its work.

One task of all tasks had been set him from the beginning--to keep his
wife's love! If she had slipped away from him, to the injury and moral
lessening of both, on his cowardice, on his clumsiness, be the blame!
Above all, on his fatal power of absorbing himself in a hundred outside
interests, controversy, literature, society. Even his work seemed to
have lost half its sacredness. If there be a canker at the root, no
matter how large the show of leaf and blossom overhead, there is but the
more to wither! Of what worth is any success, but that which is grounded
deep on the rock of personal love and duty?

Oh! let him go back to her!--wrestle with her, open his heart again, try
new ways, make new concessions. How faint the sense of _her_ trial has
been growing within him of late! hers which had once been more terrible
to him than his own! He feels the special temptations of his own nature;
he throws himself, humbled, convicted, at her feet. The woman, the scene
he has left, is effaced, blotted out by the natural intense reaction of
remorseful love.

So he sped homeward at last through the noise of Oxford Street, hearing
nothing. He opened, his own door, and let himself into the dim, silent
house. How the moment recalled to him that other supreme moment of his
life at Murewell! No light in the drawing-room. He went upstairs and
softly turned the handle of her room.

Inside the