"It isn't as if we had no end of years, no end of lives to throw away. Suppose, ages hence, if we should survive, with our human nature, and I, for one, don't want to survive without it--and we look back upon this precious bit of certain happiness that we _might_ have had, and see that we voluntarily gave up the whole of it merely because of a wretched little paper law--a miserable little conventional prejudice--what shall we think of ourselves then? We shall say that we did not deserve a gift that we did not know how to value." "Rave away," said Mr. Gordon. "It will do you good. All the same, you know, as well as I do, that it would be impossible for you to do less or more than you have done." Of course it was impossible. Few people are better than they profess to be, but he was one of those few. And if he had had the happiness of twenty lives to lose, he would have lost it all twice over rather than have kept it at any cost of peace or honour to the woman he loved. He allowed himself the right to love her still, which, as he justly remarked, couldn't hurt anybody. He thought of her as he rode about his lonely plains, looking after black boys and cattle, and dreamt of her as he lay out in the starlight nights, with a saddle for his pillow, and the red light of the camp-fire flickering through the darkness upon his face; and always with a sense that, spiritually and morally, she belonged, before all the world to him. But he never at heart regretted either that he had seen her that day at the Town-hall, or that he had elected to see her no more. He had done the only thing that it had been in him to do. CHAPTER VIII. CONSOLATION. If it is true, as it is said, and as the observation of most of us seems to testify, that the ideal marriage is hardly ever realised, and then only when the rare and brief experience has been bought at untold cost of precious years, it is, perhaps, equally true that the majority of marriages wrongly and recklessly entered into, provided the contracting parties are honestly disposed, turn out surprisingly and undeservedly well. Time, which solaces our disappointments and sanctifies our bereavements, remedies also in a great measure even these criminal mistakes. As Rachel truly said, there are "whole worlds of things" besides love--_i.e._, "the love of man and woman when they love their best"--to knit husbands and wives together; and, independently of the ties that children create, and which, to the mother at least, are supremely and eternally sacred, the innumerable soft webs of habit and association that are woven in days and years of intimate companionship grow, like ivy over a fissure in a wall, so strong as eventually not only to hide the vacant place, but in some degree to supply artificially that element of stability and permanence to the structure which in its essential substance it lacked.