its
bars. By day, by night, in Fortune's company, in Mabel's company, in
solitude, his mind turned to her. This was the refuge he kept locked,
using the expression and envisaging it.

He used to think, "Of course I fail. Of course she's always in my mind.
But while I make the effort to prevent it, while I do sometimes manage
to wrench my mind away, I'm keeping fit; I'm able to go on putting up
some sort of a fight. I'm able to help her."

To help her! But helping her, unfolding before her in his own measured
words, as one pronouncing sentence, rectitude's austere asylum for
their pains, watching her while she listened, hearing her gentle
acquiescence,--these were most terrible to his governance upon himself.

VI

He said one day, "You see, there's this, Nona. Life's got one. We're in
the thing. All the time you've got to go on. You can't go back one
single second. What you've done, you've done. It may take only a minute
in the doing, or in the saying, but it's done, or said, for all your
life, perhaps for the whole of some one else's life as well. That's
terrific, Nona.

"Nona, that's how life gets us; there's just one way we can get life and
that's by thinking forward before we do a thing. By remembering that
it's going to be there for always. What's in our hearts for one another,
Nona, is no hurt to to-morrow or to next year or to twenty years hence,
either to our own lives or to any one else's--no hurt while it's only
there and not expressed, or acted on. I've never told you what's in my
heart for you, nor you told me what's in your heart for me. It must
remain like that. Once that goes, everything goes. It's only a question
of time after that. And after that, again, only a question of time
before one of us looks back and wishes for the years over again."

She made the smallest motion of dissent.

He said, "Yes. There's right and wrong, Nona. Nothing else in between.
No compromise. No way of getting round them or over them. You must be
either one thing or the other. Once we took a step towards wrong, there
it is for ever, and all its horrible things with it--deceit,
concealment, falsehood, subterfuge, pretence: vile and beastly things
like that. I couldn't endure them; and I much less could endure thinking
I had caused you to suffer them. And then on through that mire to
dishonour.--It's easy, it sounds rather fine, to say the world well lost
for love; but honour, honour's not well lost for anything. You ca