s
should reveal too much; supposing, in short, your Mary had been not
cold, but modest; not vacant, but reflective; not obtuse, but sensitive;
not inane, but innocent; not prudish, but pure,--would you have left her
to court another woman for her wealth?"

Mr. Yorke raised his hat, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.

"The moon is up," was his first not quite relevant remark, pointing with
his whip across the moor. "There she is, rising into the haze, staring
at us wi' a strange red glower. She is no more silver than old
Helstone's brow is ivory. What does she mean by leaning her cheek on
Rushedge i' that way, and looking at us wi' a scowl and a menace?"

"Yorke, if Mary had loved you silently yet faithfully, chastely yet
fervently, as you would wish your wife to love, would you have left
her?"

"Robert!"--he lifted his arm, he held it suspended, and paused--"Robert!
this is a queer world, and men are made of the queerest dregs that
Chaos churned up in her ferment. I might swear sounding oaths--oaths
that would make the poachers think there was a bittern booming in
Bilberry Moss--that, in the case you put, death only should have parted
me from Mary. But I have lived in the world fifty-five years; I have
been forced to study human nature; and, to speak a dark truth, the odds
are, if Mary had loved and not scorned me, if I had been secure of her
affection, certain of her constancy, been irritated by no doubts, stung
by no humiliations--the odds are" (he let his hand fall heavy on the
saddle)--"the odds are I should have left her!"

They rode side by side in silence. Ere either spoke again they were on
the other side of Rushedge. Briarfield lights starred the purple skirt
of the moor. Robert, being the youngest, and having less of the past to
absorb him than his comrade, recommenced first.

"I believe--I daily find it proved--that we can get nothing in this
world worth keeping, not so much as a principle or a conviction, except
out of purifying flame or through strengthening peril. We err, we fall,
we are humbled; then we walk more carefully. We greedily eat and drink
poison out of the gilded cup of vice or from the beggar's wallet of
avarice. We are sickened, degraded; everything good in us rebels against
us; our souls rise bitterly indignant against our bodies; there is a
period of civil war; if the soul has strength, it conquers and rules
thereafter."

"What art thou going to do now, Robert? What are thy p