ubtle agony beneath it. He did not know that whereas the
one agony with the lapse of time was not passing away--it would never
do that--but was becoming more tender, more full of tears and of sweet
recollections, the other agony grew harsher, more menacing.

Rosamund had gradually come to feel that Robin had been taken out of her
arms for some great, though hidden, reason. And because of this feeling
she was learning to endure his loss with a sort of resignation. She
often thought that perhaps she had been allowed to have this consolation
because she had made an immense effort. When Robin died she had driven
Dion, who had killed her child, out of her life, but she had succeeded
in saying to God, "Thy will be done!" She had said it at first as a mere
formula, had repeated it obstinately again and again, without meaning
it at all, but trying to mean it, meaning to mean it. She had made a
prodigious, a truly heroic effort to conquer her powerfully rebellious
nature, and, in this effort, she had been helped by Father Robertson. He
knew of the anger which had overwhelmed her when her mother had died, of
how she had wished to hurt God. He knew that, with bloody sweat, she had
destroyed that enemy within her. She had wished to submit to the will of
God when Robin had been snatched from her, and at last she had actually
submitted. It was a great triumph of the spirit. But perhaps it had
left her exhausted. At any rate she had never been able to forgive God's
instrument, her husband. And so she had never been able to know the
peace of God which many of these women by whom she was surrounded knew.
In her misery she contemplated their calm. To labor and to pray--that
seemed enough to many of them, to most of them. She had known calm in
the garden at Welsley; in the Sisterhood she knew it not.

The man who was always with her assassinated calm. She felt strangely
from a distance the turmoil of his spirit. She knew of his misery
occultly. She did not deduce it from her former knowledge of what he
was. And his suffering made her suffer in a terrible way. He was her
victim and she was his.

_Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder._

In the Sisterhood Rosamund had learnt, always against her will and
despite the utmost effort of her obstinacy, the uselessness of that
command; she had learnt that those whom God hath really joined together
cannot be put asunder by man--or by woman. Dion had killed her child,
but she