‘What was he to do?’ he asked himself helplessly. What did Wisdom counsel? What did Honour urge? Surely about this latter voice there could be no question. Honour would have him be true to Madoline, at any sacrifice of his own feelings. Duty was plain enough here. He had pledged himself to her by every bond which honest men hold sacred. He must keep his word. ‘But if we are both miserable for life?’ he asked himself. ‘Can she be happy if I am wretched? And what charm has existence for me without Daphne?’ ‘You must forget Daphne,’ urged Duty; ‘your first and nobler love must obtain the mastery. You must pluck this idle weed, this mere caprice, out of your heart.’ He told himself that the thing was to be done and he would try honestly to do it. He would steel himself against Daphne’s wiles. Did not Ulysses pluck himself away from the enchantress’s fatal island, wrench himself out of her very web, and get home to Ithaca sound in body and mind, and live happy ever afterwards with his faithful Penelope? Or at least this is the popular idea of Ulysses, in spite of those breathings of slander which make the Circe episode something more than Platonic. What nobler image can life give than that of a faithful lover, a loyal husband, tempted and yet true? Nor did poor little Daphne go out of her way to exercise Circean arts. She charmed as the flowers charm, innocently and unconsciously. She was no Becky Sharp, weaving a subtle web out of people’s looks and smiles, drooping lashes, lifted eyelids, the arrowy gleams of fatal green eyes. She wanted to be faithful to her lover, and loyal to her sister. Her letter had been straight and true. If he sinned, he sinned of his own accord, and had no such excuses as Adam used against the partner God had given him. He wandered about restlessly, in an utterly purposeless way, till it was time to go back to the seven o’clock breakfast. He would have liked to start alone for the shining slate mountain yonder, to spend the day there in a sultry solitude, lying on his back and staring up at the unfathomable blue, smoking a little, reading Heine a little—Heine’s ballad-book had been his gospel of late—idling away the empty day, and growing wiser and better in solitude. But he was pledged to go in beaten tracks; to go and eat and drink at The Bear, and gaze at the lower glacier, like a Cook’s tourist, and be faintly interested in the coachman’s exposition of the view, and be blandly tolerant of girls selling edelweiss, and boys waking the echoes with Alpine horns, and all the conventional features of that exquisite drive from Interlaken to Grindelwald.