I have not said much concerning Malcolm's feelings with regard to Lady Clementina, but all this time the sense of her existence had been like an atmosphere surrounding and pervading his thought. He saw in her the promise of all he could desire to see in woman. His love was not of the blind-little-boy sort, but of a deeper, more exacting, keen-eyed kind, that sees faults where even a true mother will not, so jealous is it of the perfection of the beloved. But one thing was plain, even to this seraphic dragon that dwelt sleepless in him--and there was eternal content in the thought--that such a woman, once started on the right way, would soon leave fault and weakness behind her, and become as one of the grand women of old, whose religion was simply what religion is--life, neither more nor less than life. She would be a saint without knowing it, the only grand kind of sainthood. Whoever can think of religion as an addition to life, however glorious--a starry crown, say, set upon the head of humanity--is not yet the least in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever thinks of life as a something that could be without religion is in deathly ignorance of both. Life and religion are one, or neither is anything: I will not say neither is growing to be anything. Religion is no way of life, no show of life, no observance of any sort. It is neither the food nor medicine of being. It is life essential. To think otherwise is as if a man should pride himself on his honesty or his parental kindness, or hold up his head amongst men because he never killed one: were he less than honest or kind or free from blood, he would yet think something of himself. The man to whom virtue is but the ornament of character, something over and above, not essential to it, is not yet a man. If I say, then, that Malcolm was always thinking about Lady Clementina when he was not thinking about something he _had_ to think about, have I not said nearly enough on the matter? Should I ever dream of attempting to set forth what love is in such a man for such a woman? There are comparatively few that have more than the glimmer of a notion of what love means. God only knows how grandly, how passionately, yet how calmly, how divinely, the man and the woman he has made might, may, shall love each other. One thing only I will dare to say--that the love that belonged to Malcolm's nature was one through the very nerves of which the love of God must rise and flow and return as its essential life. If any man think that such a love could no longer be the love of the man for the woman, he knows his own nature, and that of the woman he pretends or thinks he adores, but in the darkest of glasses.