But Adèle did not despair; she had a woman's supreme faith in "the to-come." Something would arouse Arthur's dormant energies and bring out the latent fire of his nature. In the mean time she, with the rest of his world, was pleased to notice his growing interest in the fine arts, though she, wiser than they, felt inclined to put down his constant haunting of the picture-galleries to a growing restlessness that meant uneasiness with the aimless life of self-gratification he was leading and a stretching-out after something higher. And Adèle was partially right. Arthur was changed. Perhaps it was more the sadness than the beauty of that fair woman's face which haunted him so strangely, mingling with all his thoughts a certain self-reproach which he found it very difficult to understand. It may have been that in the pale, calm face, resolute in endurance, he saw for one moment what was going on for ever around him; he read the mystic law of nature--sacrifice of self. For life is glad; where gladness is not life may be borne, but not loved or rejoiced in, and in the calm surrender of life's gladness to the call of life's necessity there is a surrender of life itself, the most beautiful part of life. Something of this he had seen in Margaret's pale face. A joy put away, surrendered, a burden taken up and patiently borne. This it was that filled his mind when the first impression of her loveliness had in a manner passed. He saw the suffering, and beside the suffering he saw himself, self-indulgent, careless, free of hand, light of spirit, with no thought, in a general way, beyond the enjoyment of the present hour. Often before Arthur had expressed something of this: lolling in a luxurious arm-chair with his feet on the fender, while Adèle amused him by a song or read to him something that had been charming her, he would say with a comfortable sigh, "What a good-for-nothing sort of fellow I am, Adèle!" But then he had scarcely felt it, or if he had it had been only with a kind of impression that the good-for-nothingness sat elegantly on the shoulders of a young man of property. Clever Mrs. Churchill rather encouraged the impression. Young men with ideas are apt to become unmanageable, and she was earnestly desirous of keeping Arthur in her invisible leading-strings.