Such questions have their answers, but they do not occur very readily to young men hopelessly in love and half out of their wits with jealousy. He might have taken refuge in prayer, but at that moment he did not want to pray. He wanted to think about himself, to be himself throughout the entire reach of his consciousness, to lose himself in the tempest of emotion which seemed to drive out, beat, and shatter every hindrance to its furious sweep. A smouldering fire is for a while got under, and yet by suppression is but thrown in, to spread more widely and deeply than before. So his fatal affection, perhaps pitilessly fought down in the first instance--asserted its power--its power for evil. Not to love was not to live. He was dead while he lived. He could not find peace in an invisible world of which he did not see any more even a shadow round about him. _Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?_ He did not believe that. What miserable scruples to torment, blind, and pollute the soul! Pascal has written that there are thousands who sin without regret, who sin with gladness, who feel no warning and no interior desire not to sin. They doubted, hated, loved, acted, felt, and thought just as they pleased. Perhaps they were not happy, but if they received the punishment of wrong-doing, the wrong at least was committed out of fetters and joyously. It is not until men find themselves assailed by a strong wish that they perceive how very still and very small, all but inaudible, the still, small voice can be. A moment comes when one ceases to think--one wills, and if one is able and the will is sufficiently determined, the purpose is carried into effect. Temptations to steal, to lie, to deceive, to gamble, to excess in drink and the like cannot approach a certain order of mind. But the craving for knowledge and a fuller life--either in a spiritual or the human way--is implanted ineradicably in every soul, and while it may rest inert and seem nullified in a kind of apathy, the craving is there--to be aroused surely enough at some dangerous hour. And of all the dangerous hours in life, the hour of disappointed love is the most critical. Calm spectators of mortal folly who have been satisfactorily married for twenty years and more, who have sons to provide for and daughters to establish, cherish a disdain of love-stories and boast that they have no patience with morbidity. Love--which put them into being and keeps the earth in existence--seems to all such a silly malady peculiar to the sentimental in early youth. So they put the First Cause--in one of its many manifestations--in the waste-paper basket, asking each other what will become of Charles if he cannot find a rich wife, and poor Alice, if she cannot entrap a suitable husband. But there are others who look on life with some hope of understanding it truly, in part, at any rate, and these know, perhaps by experience, perhaps by sympathy, that whereas bodily disturbances may pass away leaving little or no effect upon the general health, all mental tumults are perpetual in their consequences: they never die out entirely, and they live, sometimes with appalling energy, sometimes with gnawing listlessness, to the end of an existence. Robert, in the judgment of his intellect and his senses, had found his ideal. Brigit did not belong to "the despised day of small things"; she was the woman of his imagination--the well-beloved, and having gained her, was he to say--Farewell? It seemed so. Meanwhile, the graceful, swaying dialogue rippled between the players on the stage; the smiling audience, hushed with interest, gazed at the delightful beings before them; the exquisite Marquise had uttered her two last speeches--