graceful, strong in the perfection of
their youth and their great devotion, amid that ethereal brightness,
they seemed as two heroic figures--immortal, fairy lovers moving
through the lovely wonder of that fairy-land. As they drew near,
Katherine stopped, leant--with a superb abandon--back against her
husband, resting her hand on his shoulder, drew his arm around her
waist for support, drew his face down to her upturned face until their
lips met, while the moonlight played upon the jewels on her bare arms
and neck and gleamed softly on the surface of her white, satin dress.

To true lovers the longest kiss is all too sadly short--a thing brief
almost in proportion to its sweetness. But to Julius March, watching
from the blackness of the doorway, it seemed a whole eternity before
Richard Calmady raised his head. Then Julius turned and fled down the
passage and back into the chill study, where the candles burned on
either side the image of the Virgin Mother cradling the dead Christ
upon her knee.

Gentle persons, breaking from the lines of self-restraint, run to a
curious violence in emotion. All day long, shrink from it, ignore it,
as he might, a moral storm had been brewing. Now it broke. Not from
those two lovers did Julius turn thus in amazement and terror; but from
just that from which it is impossible for any one to turn in actual
fact--namely from himself. He was appalled by the narrowness of his own
past outlook; appalled by the splendour of that heritage which, by his
own act, he had forfeited. The cassock ceased, indeed, to be a refuge,
the welcome livery of home and rest. It had become a prison-suit, a
badge of slavery, against which his whole being rebelled. For the
moment--happily violence is short-lived, only for a very little while
do even the gentlest persons "see red"--asceticism appeared to him as a
blasphemy against the order of nature and of nature's God. His vow of
perpetual chastity, made with so passionate an enthusiasm, for the
moment appeared to him an act of absolutely monstrous vanity and
self-conceit. In his stupid ignorance he had tried to be wiser than his
Maker, preferring the ordinances of man, to the glad and merciful
purposes of God. In so doing had he not, only too possibly, committed
the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost?

Poor Julius, his thought had indeed run almost humorously mad! Yet it
was characteristic of the man that the breaking of his self-imposed
bonds neve