After this, if a stray obstacle comes in the way, there are two pairs of hands to gather, two pair of feet to trample whatever obstructs the smoothness of their onward path, each growing stronger and more willing for the others sake, 'till they reach the tedious journey's end, content and happy. All this Honor tried to see clearly and impartially. It had pleased destiny to send back him whom she loved more than all the world besides, and to send him back unaltered, except that he was handsomer, truer, and more devoted than ever. The precious secret, that she had guarded for so long, and with such a jealous care, had been coaxed from its hiding-place over the threshold of her lips, and henceforth life meant something vastly different from what it had hitherto been. She had died, as it were, to her old self, she would be re-created to that life of holy mysteries, henceforth a double mission awaited her, double hopes, double fears, those little untried hands--and she raised them before her--must work two shares in the task of life, but there was no discouragement in the thought. Those who have loved as earnestly as she did, will understand why, for there is a secret courage, and a secret strength, for those who have learned to cherish the image of another, and to work out another's welfare. There is a fortitude born on the altar-step, whereon the wedded pair has knelt, to speak the marriage vows, that none but the wedded can know, that none but souls bound together in a holy wedlock can understand, the fortitude that endures in the breast of a woman, through all the fierce struggles of her married life, that dies only with the last long sigh of relief at the hour of physical death, that is unquenched by the ashes of misery and woe that fall on its flickering flame, from time to time, the fortitude that thrives on sacrifice and endurance, and which if governed by christian motives, becomes a pass-port for the tried soul, before Heaven's far-off gate. Honor felt beforehand, that the active life which lay untouched in the future for her, was to be sweeter, and happier far, than the passive existence of her girlhood. Matrimony, in her eyes, was a state of such sublime responsibilities, that she could spare her thoughts to no other consideration during these dreary hours of anxious solitude. She spent her whole days in sketching the hereafter, just as she would have it. Already she was planning her wifely duties, and asking herself how she should learn to be always as interesting and as dear to her husband as she was to her lover. She invented modes of amusement and distraction, that would make home cheerful and fascinating for him, resolving within herself, that, if it lay in woman's power, to attract and bind a man's heart to his fireside, in preference to the old haunts of his pleasures, she would do it.