He had taken life in an uncompromising spirit of old; he had displayed a strength of purpose and a grip of his own values in some measure remarkable for a man, at that time barely beyond his majority. And now, into a life that he had deemed cut away once and for all from all further human complexities, was come this unexpected and supreme problem. Yet such rifts and gleams as had of late been thrust through his grey existence must now be shut out. For a time he considered with himself whether this should be so; but he weighed Dinah's fate more tenderly in the balance than his own. For him, indeed, the facts did not preclude possibility of actual temptation; but he had yet to learn how they would affect her. Had he cared to take consolation there, he might have done so; but what had encouraged hope in another man, discouraged him. His temptations were not proof against his principles, and he foresaw that more than a narration of facts might be necessary when the day came for bare speech with Dinah. The necessity for any return to the past had never been anticipated by Maynard; but he had long seen now that one certainly involved the other. The need for confession troubled him little; the time of trial must come with Dinah's reception of his confession. He hoped that she might take such an instant decision that deeper distresses would be avoided; and yet the very hope seemed cowardly to him; and sometimes he felt a desire above or below his own view of rectitude. What promised distress in one mood opened the gates to a new and a blessed life in another. He was come, however, to the inevitable place of open dealing: he must tell her all that still remained hidden from her. With a sense of relief he felt that more could not be done until that position had been reached; and for the present he put away from himself any thought of what would follow his revelation in her mind, or the great final decision that must be called for from his own. Then he dropped his affairs for a little while and let the sense of the immense and outspread earth drift into his thoughts. It heartened him and inspired him to a dim resolution that a man might glean something from the purposes of a world so large and splendid, so that he, too, should rise worthy of his place in it, and largely and splendidly order his own part amid the great scheme of things. But he guessed all the time that such poetry only played over the surface of forthcoming events. It had less power of reality, than the bubbles on a wave to influence its way. The final pattern of things lay deep within himself. No man or woman could ever alter the terms of his own destiny, or change the principles under which he willed to live. So he imagined. CHAPTER XX THE HUNTER'S MOON