the speech of a lady staying at the Court: "Oh! yes, I
remember her case perfectly. She was the poor woman who----" "Did not,
I am certain, Lady Bonington." The tone of his voice had made someone
laugh uneasily; the subject was changed.

All divorce was against his convictions, but in a blurred way he
admitted that there were cases where release was unavoidable. He was not
a man to ask for confidences, or expect them to be given him. He himself
had never confided his spiritual struggles to any living creature; and
the unspiritual struggle had little interest for Miltoun. He was ready
at any moment to stake his life on the perfection of the idol he had
set up within his soul, as simply and straightforwardly as he would have
placed his body in front of her to shield her from harm.

The same fanaticism, which looked on his passion as a flower by itself,
entirely apart from its suitability to the social garden, was also the
driving force which sent him up to London to declare his intention
to his father before he spoke to Mrs. Noel. The thing should be done
simply, and in right order. For he had the kind of moral courage found
in those who live retired within the shell of their own aspirations. Yet
it was not perhaps so much active moral courage as indifference to
what others thought or did, coming from his inbred resistance to the
appreciation of what they felt.

That peculiar smile of the old Tudor Cardinal--which had in it
invincible self-reliance, and a sort of spiritual sneer--played over his
face when he speculated on his father's reception of the coming news;
and very soon he ceased to think of it at all, burying himself in the
work he had brought with him for the journey. For he had in high degree
the faculty, so essential to public life, of switching off his whole
attention from one subject to another.

On arriving at Paddington he drove straight to Valleys House.

This large dwelling with its pillared portico, seemed to wear an air
of faint surprise that, at the height of the season, it was not more
inhabited. Three servants relieved Miltoun of his little luggage; and
having washed, and learned that his father would be dining in, he went
for a walk, taking his way towards his rooms in the Temple. His long
figure, somewhat carelessly garbed, attracted the usual attention, of
which he was as usual unaware. Strolling along, he meditated deeply on
a London, an England, different from this flatulent hurly-burly, th