Lyra Apostolica" fitly expressed the passions of his heart. To
the Church, at once his mother and his mistress, he had wholly given
his first love. He had gone so far, indeed, in a rapture of devotion
one Easter day, during the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, as to
impose upon himself a vow of livelong chastity. This he did--let it be
added--without either the sanction or knowledge of his spiritual
advisers. The vow, therefore, remained unwitnessed and unratified, but
he held it inviolable nevertheless. And it lay but lightly upon him,
joyfully almost--rather as a ridding of himself of possible
perturbations and obsessions, than as an act of most austere
self-renunciation. In his ignorance he merely went forward with an
increased freedom of spirit. All of which is set down, not without
underlying pathos, in the diary of that date.

And that freedom of spirit remained by him, notwithstanding his altered
circumstances. It even served--indirectly, since none knew the fact of
his self-dedication save himself--as a basis of pleasant intercourse
with the women of his own social standing whom he now met. It served
him thus in respect of Lady Calmady, who accepted him as a member of
her new household with charming kindliness, treating him with a gentle
solicitude born of pity for his far from robust health and for the
mental struggles which she understood him to have passed through.

Many persons, it must be owned, described Julius as remarkably ugly.
But he did not strike Katherine thus. His heavy black hair, beardless
face and sallow skin--rendered dull and colourless, his features
thickened, though not actually scarred, by smallpox, which he had had
as a child,--his sensitive mouth, and the questioning expression of his
short-sighted brown eyes, reminded her of a fifteenth-century
Florentine portrait that had always challenged her attention when she
passed it in the vestibule of a certain obscure, yet aristocratic,
Parisian hotel, on the left bank--well understood--of the Seine.

The man of the portrait was narrow-chested, clothed in black. So was
Julius March. He had long-fingered, finely shaped hands. So had Julius.
He gave her the impression of a person endowed with a capacity of
prolonged and silent self-sacrifice. So did Julius. She wondered about
his story. For Julius, at least--little as she or he then suspected
it--the deepest places of the story still lay ahead.

CHAPTER IV

RAISING PROBLEMS WHICH IT I