And Barbara? Ah! she undoubtedly would agree with almost every word of it; he caught himself wondering whether the position he had won, and which he owed in a measure,--perhaps in a very great measure,--to his wife's fortune, would be really forfeited, were he to become again a comparatively poor man. Berwick had by no means forgotten what it was to be straitened in means; and he realised that want of substantial wealth had been a great bar even to Lord Bosworth. Still, oddly enough, the thought of giving up his wealth for the sake of Barbara was beginning to appeal to his imagination. He went so far as to tell himself that, had he come across her as a girl, he would of course have married her, and forfeited his large income without a regret. So it was that, during the long solitary spring day, spent by him almost wholly in the forest, Berwick experienced many phases of acute and varying feeling, most of which tended to war with the course to which he was being inexorably driven by his sense of honour rather than by his conscience. But for Boringdon's revelation as to Pedro Rebell's state, Berwick's conscience would have been at ease. So much he had the honesty to admit. Apart from that one point which so intimately involved his honour, he was without scruple, and that although he loved Barbara the more for being, as he well knew she was, scrupulous, and, as he thought, conscience-ridden. Nothing, so he told himself again and again during those hours of fierce battle, could alter the fact that she belonged to him in that special sense which is, as concerns a man and a woman, the outcome of certain emotional experiences only possible between two natures which are drawn to one another by an over-mastering instinct. In the days that followed the fire at Chancton Priory, there had arisen, between Berwick and Barbara, a deep, wordless intimacy and communion, which at the time had had the effect of making him divine what was in her mind, with a clearness which had struck those about them as being actually uncanny. And yet it was then, during those days, that Berwick had sworn to himself that his love was pure and selfless in its essence. As she had lain there, her hand quivering when it felt his touch, every gross element of his nature had become fused and refined in the clear flame of his passion. It had been during these exquisite, to him sacred moments, that he had told himself that on these terms of spiritual closeness and fusion he would be content to remain.