render brought not a sense of weakness but of recovered energy. It
was not in his nature to analyze his motives, or spend his strength in
weighing closely balanced alternatives of conduct; and though, during
the last purposeless months, he had grown to brood over every spring of
action in himself and others, this tendency disappeared at once in
contact with the deed to be done. It was as though a tributary stream,
gathering its crystal speed among the hills, had been suddenly poured
into the stagnant waters of his will; and he saw now how thick and
turbid those waters had become--how full of the slime-bred life that
chokes the springs of courage.

His whole desire now was to be generous to his wife: to bear the full
brunt of whatever pain their parting brought. Justine had said that
Bessy seemed nervous and unhappy: it was clear, therefore, that she also
had suffered from the wounds they had dealt each other, though she kept
her unmoved front to the last. Poor child! Perhaps that insensible
exterior was the only way she knew of expressing courage! It seemed to
Amherst that all means of manifesting the finer impulses must slowly
wither in the Lynbrook air. As he approached his destination, his
thoughts of her were all pitiful: nothing remained of the personal
resentment which had debased their parting. He had telephoned from town
to announce the hour of his return, and when he emerged from the station
he half-expected to find her seated in the brougham whose lamps
signalled him through the early dusk. It would be like her to undergo
such a reaction of feeling, and to express it, not in words, but by
taking up their relation as if there had been no break in it. He had
once condemned this facility of renewal as a sign of lightness, a
result of that continual evasion of serious issues which made the life
of Bessy's world a thin crust of custom above a void of thought. But he
now saw that, if she was the product of her environment, that
constituted but another claim on his charity, and made the more precious
any impulses of natural feeling that had survived the unifying pressure
of her life. As he approached the brougham, he murmured mentally: "What
if I were to try once more?"

Bessy had not come to meet him; but he said to himself that he should
find her alone at the house, and that he would make his confession at
once. As the carriage passed between the lights on the tall stone
gate-posts, and rolled through the bare shr