come, the shaft of cloud turning to the pillar of fire. For here, at last,
life lay before her as it was: not brave, garlanded and victorious, but
naked, grovelling and diseased, dragging its maimed limbs through the mud,
yet lifting piteous hands to the stars. Love itself, once throned aloft
on an altar of dreams, how it stole to her now, storm-beaten and scarred,
pleading for the shelter of her breast! Love, indeed, not in the old sense
in which she had conceived it, but a graver, austerer presence--the charity
of the mystic three. She thought she had ceased to love Denis--but what had
she loved in him but her happiness and his? Their affection had been the
_garden enclosed_ of the Canticles, where they were to walk forever in
a delicate isolation of bliss. But now love appeared to her as something
more than this--something wider, deeper, more enduring than the selfish
passion of a man and a woman. She saw it in all its far-reaching issues,
till the first meeting of two pairs of young eyes kindled a light which
might be a high-lifted beacon across dark waters of humanity.

All this did not come to her clearly, consecutively, but in a series of
blurred and shifting images. Marriage had meant to her, as it means to
girls brought up in ignorance of life, simply the exquisite prolongation of
wooing. If she had looked beyond, to the vision of wider ties, it was as
a traveller gazes over a land veiled in golden haze, and so far distant
that the imagination delays to explore it. But now through the blur of
sensations one image strangely persisted--the image of Denis's child. Had
she ever before thought of their having a child? She could not remember.
She was like one who wakens from a long fever: she recalled nothing of
her former self or of her former feelings. She knew only that the vision
persisted--the vision of the child whose mother she was not to be. It was
impossible that she should marry Denis--her inmost soul rejected him ...
but it was just because she was not to be the child's mother that its
image followed her so pleadingly. For she saw with perfect clearness the