Contemplation of this contrast, sense of his desertion, overcame his habitual resistance to self-pity, a feeling against which he was usually on the stronger guard for his knowledge that it was a concomitant of his inherent sensibility. He quite yielded to it for a time; and though 'twas sharpened by his comparison of the Margaret he had just left, with the pretty, soft-smiling Madge of other days, that comparison eventually supplanted self-pity with pity for her, a feeling no less laden with sorrow. He dared not think of what her perverseness might yet lead her to. For himself he saw nothing but hopeless sorrow, unless she could be brought back to her better self. But, alas, he by whose influence that end might be achieved--for he could not believe that her heart had quite cast him out--was flying from her, and years might pass ere he should see her again: meanwhile, how intolerable would life be to him! His heart, with the instinct of self-protection, sought some interest in which it might find relief. He thought of the cause for which he was fighting. That must suffice; it must take the place of wife and love. Cold, impersonal, inadequate as it seemed now, he knew that in the end it would suffice to fill great part of that inner heart which she had occupied. He turned to it with the kindling affection which a man ever has for the resource that is left him when he is scorned elsewhere. And he felt his ardour for it fanned by his deepened hate for the opposing cause, a hate intensified by the circumstance that his rival was of that cause. For that rival's sake, he hated with a fresh implacability the whole royal side and everything pertaining to it. He pressed his teeth together, and resolved to make that side pay as dearly as lay in him to make it, for what he had lost of his wife's love, and for what she had lost of her probity. And the man himself, Falconer! 'Twas he that commanded this night's wild attempt, if she had spoken truly. Well, Falconer should not succeed this night, and Philip, with a kind of bitter elation, thanked God 'twas through him that the attempt should be the more utterly defeated. He patted his horse--a faithful beast that had known but a short rest since it had travelled over the same road in the opposite direction--and used all means to keep it at the best pace compatible with its endurance. Forward it sped, in long, unvarying bounds, seeing the road in the dark, or rather in the strange dusky light yielded by the snow-covered earth and seeming rather to originate there than to be reflected from the impenetrable obscurity overhead.