d of remorse or regret in Dr. Merrick's nature.
He was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had sold
his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel
Waterton--had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a
loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly
acquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck and
his prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form a
blameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every way
his moral and mental superior, but in despite of the conventional
ban of society, Dr. Merrick had cast him off as an open reprobate.
And why? Simply because that union was unsanctioned by the
exponents of a law they despised, and unblessed by the priests of a
creed they rejected. Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsic
moral value of an act such people think about, but the light in
which it is regarded by a selfish society.

Unchastity, it has been well said, is union without love; and Alan
would have none of it.

He went back to Herminia more than ever convinced of that spotless
woman's moral superiority to every one else he had ever met with.
She sat, a lonely soul, enthroned amid the halo of her own perfect
purity. To Alan, she seemed like one of those early Italian
Madonnas, lost in a glory of light that surrounds and half hides
them. He reverenced her far too much to tell her all that had
happened. How could he wound those sweet ears with his father's
coarse epithets?

They took the club train that afternoon to Paris. There they slept
the night in a fusty hotel near the Gare du Nord, and went on in
the morning by the daylight express to Switzerland. At Lucerne and
Milan they broke the journey once more. Herminia had never yet
gone further afield from England than Paris; and this first glimpse
of a wider world was intensely interesting to her. Who can help
being pleased, indeed, with that wonderful St. Gothard--the crystal
green Reuss shattering itself in white spray into emerald pools by
the side of the railway; Wasen church perched high upon its
solitary hilltop; the Biaschina ravine, the cleft rocks of Faido,
the serpentine twists and turns of the ramping line as it mounts or
descends its spiral zigzags? Dewy Alpine pasture, tossed masses of
land-slip, white narcissus on the banks, snowy peaks in the
background--all alike were fresh visions of delight to Herminia;
and she drank it all in with the pure childi