was from the marriage
holiday of most young couples. Maurice had looked forward to the wedding
as a desperate man looks forward to a new point of departure in his
life. He had fixed all his hopes of possible peace upon it. He had dated
new days of calm, if not of brightness, from it. He had sometimes
vaguely, sometimes desperately, looked to it as to a miracle day, on
which--how or why he knew not--the shadow would be lifted from his life.
The man who is doomed to death has a moment of acute expectation when
some new doctor places him under a fresh mode of treatment. For a few
days the increased vitality of his anxious mind sheds a dawn of apparent
life through his body. But the mind collapses. The dawn fades. The
darkness increases, death steals on. So it was with Maurice. Immediately
after the wedding, Lily noticed that he fell into a strangely watchful
condition of abstraction. He was full of tenderness to her, full of
cares for her comfort, but even in his moments of obvious solicitude he
seemed to be on the alert to catch the stir of some remote activity, or
to be listening for the sound of some distant voice. His own fate
engrossed him even in this first period of novel companionship with
another soul. The monomania of the haunted man gripped him and would not
release him. He thought of Lily, but he thought more, and with a deeper
passion, of himself.

The girl divined this, but she did not for an instant rebel. She had set
up a beautiful unselfishness in her heart and had consecrated it.
Purpose does much for a woman, helps her sometimes to rise higher than
perhaps man can ever rise, to the pale and vacant peaks of an inactive
martyrdom. And Lily was full of a passion of purpose known only to
herself. She loved Maurice not merely as a girl loves a man, but also as
the protective woman loves the being dependent upon her. His secret was
hers, but hers was not his. She had her beautiful loneliness of silent
hope, and that sustained her.

They went away together. In the train Maurice said to her suddenly, with
a sort of blaze of hungry eagerness:

"Lily--Lily--to-day there is a silence for me. Oh, Lily, if you have
brought me silence."

He seized her hand and his was hot like fire.

"Will it last--can it last?" he whispered.

And he glanced all round the carriage like one anticipating an answer to
his question from some unknown quarter, then he said:

"The noise of the train is so loud, perhaps--"

"Hush!"