te to roses of a future that Maurice, in his misery, could not
see, in his self-engrossment could not divine. There is no living thing
that understands how to wait, that can feel the beauty of patience, as a
woman understands and feels. The curious depth of calm in Lily which
irritated Maurice was created by a faith, half religious, half
unreasoning, wholly strong and determined, such as no man ever knows in
quite the same fullness as a woman. It is such a perfection of faith
which gilds the silences in which the souls of many women wait,
surrounded by the clouds of apparently shattered lives, but conscious
that there is a great outcome, obscure and remote, but certain as the
purpose which beats forever in Creation.

From that day Maurice no longer kept up a pretence of energy, or a
simulation of even tolerable happiness in his home. The idea that the
spirit of the dead child was stirred to an intense disquietude by his
connection with Lily, and that, consequently, his marriage had deepened
his punishment, grew in him until at length it became fixed. He brooded
over it for hours together, his ears full of that eternal complaining.
He began to feel that by linking himself with Lily he had added to his
original sin, that his wedding had been a ceremony almost criminal, and
that if he had scourged himself by living ascetically, and by putting
rigorously away from him all earthly happiness, he might at last have
laid the child to rest and found peace and forgiveness himself. And this
fixed idea led him to shut Lily entirely out from his heart. He looked
upon the fate of her being with him in the house as irrevocable. But he
resolved that he ought to disassociate himself from her as far as
possible, and, without explaining further to her the thought that now
possessed him, he ceased to sit with her, ceased to walk out with her.

After dinner at night he retired to his study leaving her alone in the
drawing-room. He let her go up to bed without bidding her good-night.
When he was obliged to be with her at meals he maintained for the most
part an obstinate silence.

Yet the cry of the child grew louder. The spirit of the child was not
mollified. Its persecution continued and seemed to him to grow more
persistent with each passing day.

What else could he do? How could he separate himself more completely
from Lily?

Canon Alston came one day to solve this problem for him. The Canon had
resolved on taking a holiday, and bei