Perhaps never before had Eustace been so strongly tempted as at that moment to abandon the cause to which he was pledged. Through all the weeks he had spent beneath the roof of Castle Penarvon, he had been conscious of two strong influences working upon him--one the desire to enkindle in the minds of the ignorant rustics the spark of discontent and revolt against needless wrongs, which should result in reformed legislation, and the raising of the whole country; the other, the keen desire to win for his wife the beautiful and unapproachable girl he called cousin, and who every day exercised over him a stronger and stronger power. With him it had been a case of love almost at first sight. Eustace was one of those men who are always striving to attain and obtain the best and highest good which the world has to offer, not as a matter of preference only, but as a matter of principle. Hitherto he had never seen a woman who stirred his heart, for he had never seen one who in any way corresponded to the lofty ideals of womanhood which he had kept pure within him from boyhood. His whole mind and soul had been given to study, to learning, and to the attainment of those objects upon which, as his mind matured, his whole being became set. Woman as an individual had neither part nor lot in his life until he met his cousin Bride, and knew before he had been many days at Penarvon that in her he had found his ideal. That she was a mystic, that she held extraordinary and altogether impracticable views of life, and lived in a world of her own which could never be his, he was perfectly aware; but then he was also aware that the ideal woman of his dreams must likewise live a life apart, wrapped in her own pure imaginings and Divine ideals, until the power of love should awake within her another and a deeper life, and bring her to a knowledge of joys hitherto unknown. A sceptic himself, he was in nowise daunted to find that the woman of his choice was as devout, and almost as full of mystic fervour, as a mediæval nun. Somehow it all pieced in with his preconceived ideas of perfect womanhood, and he said within himself that this single-minded devotion and power to lead the higher life, when directed into other channels by the kindling touch of a great love, was exactly the force and power most needed for the work which must be that of his own life and of hers who became bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.