"Unto this hope is man tamed, and shall his Tamer then be deemed intolerable? Unto this hope is man tamed, and shall he murmur against his beneficient Tamer, if He chance to use the scourge?... "Whether, therefore, Thou dealest softly with us that we be not wearied in the way, or chastisest us that we wander not from the way, _Thou art become our refuge, O Lord_." As Mark read, the pain of too great light was softened to him. What had been hard, white light, glowed more rosy until it flushed his horizon with full glory. It wanted a small space in time, but a mighty change in the spirit, before Mark read Edmund's letter with a keen wish to enter into its full meaning, and judge it wisely. Having come to himself, he was, as ever, ready to give that self away. He was full of a strange energy; he smiled to feel that the strokes of the lash were unfelt, while consciousness was lost in love. This was God's anaesthetic. But it thrilled the soul with vitality, and in no sense but the absence of pain did it suspend the faculties. He had no doubt, no hesitation, as to what he must do. He would go to Molly, he must see her at once, but not a word should pass his lips of what Edmund wanted him to say. Not a moment must be lost. Who might not betray her danger and destroy her opportunity? Molly must be brought to do this thing of herself without any admixture of fear, without any aim or object but to sacrifice all for what was right. He yearned with utter simplicity that this might be her way out. Let her do it for herself. Let her do it of herself, thought Mark--not because she is afraid, not because her vast possessions appear the least insecure. And the action would be far more noble just because, at the moment of renunciation, the world would, for the first time, suspect her guilt. To Mark it seemed now the crowning touch of mercy that the criminal should be allowed to drink deep of the chalice. "Her own affair"--that was what the dying mother had said of the unfortunate child to whom she offered so gross a temptation. And in the depths of his mind there was the conviction that it was a particular truth as to this individual soul, that not only would the heroic be the only antagonist to the base, but that some such moral revolution alone could be the beginning of cleansing of what had become foul, and the driving out of the noxious and the vile. CHAPTER XXXVIII NO SHADOW OF A CLOUD It was in the evening, and Edmund was waiting in Rose's drawing-room until she should come back from a meeting of one of her charitable committees.