If he could only know the true reason of that persistency she had shown about the expedition, in the face of Augustina's wailings, and his own silence? She had been dull--Heaven knows she had been dull at Bannisdale, for these two months. On every occasion of his return from those intermediate absences to which he had forced himself, he had perceived that she drooped, that she was dumbly at war with the barriers that shut her youth away from change and laughter, and the natural amusements, flatteries and courtings that wait, or should wait, on sweet-and-twenty. More than once he had realised the fever pulsing through the girl's unrest. Of course she was dissatisfied and starved. She was not of the sort that accepts the _rôle_ of companion or sick nurse without a murmur. What could he do--he, into whose being she had crept with torturing power--he who could not marry her even if she should cease to hate him--who could only helplessly put land and distance between them? And then, who knows what a girl plans, to what she will stoop, out of the mere ebullience and rush of her youth--with what haloes she will surround even the meanest heads? Her blood calls her--not this man or that! She takes her decisions--behind that veil of mystery that masks the woman at her will. And who knows---who can know? A mother, perhaps. Not Augustina--not he--nor another. Groans broke from him. In vain he scourged himself and the vileness of his own thoughts. In vain he said to himself, "All her instincts, her preferences, are pure, guileless, delicate--I could swear it, I, who have watched her every look and motion." Temper?--yes. Caprice?--yes. A hundred immaturities and rawnesses?--yes! but at the root of all, the most dazzling, the most convincing maidenliness. Not the down-dropt eyes, the shrinking modesties of your old Christian or Catholic types--far from it. But something that, as you dwelt upon it, seemed to make doubt a mere folly. And yet his very self-assurances, his very protests, left him in torment. There is something in the Catholic discipline on points of sex-relation that perhaps weakens a man's instinctive confidence in women. Evil and its varieties, in this field, are pressed upon his thoughts perpetually with a scholastic fulness so complete, a deductive frankness so compelling, that nothing stands against the process. He sees corruption everywhere--dreads it everywhere. There is no part of its empire, or its action, that his imagination is allowed to leave in shadow. It is the confessional that works. The devout Catholic sees all the world _sub specie peccati_. The flesh seems to him always ready to fall--the devil always at hand.