Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love for the first and last time in his life; and because animal passion had asserted itself in Paris, and because that passion seemed to be the characteristic of those butterfly affairs that had preceded this love for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether. This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not have with the sanction of holy authority he would not now attempt at all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one might kneel at the shrine of some virginal goddess before starting upon a lifelong journey into the countries where that goddess is unknown. They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion. "If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now think of as so right might end by being very wrong." "Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be right." "Not the ruin of our lives?" "When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your husband's----" "Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is good and kind and brave; but somehow--I don't know why: I don't know why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did love him." "Nevertheless, you are married to him." "Yes; but is a divorce wrong when----" "A divorce is always wrong." "Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the marriage a real one?" "Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of any faith is binding." "But marriage is a contract." "Marriage is a sacrament." They would get so far--always darting down this byway and that of casuistry, only to find that the ways were blind alleys ending against the impregnable wall of arbitrary custom--and then she would come back to his point of view. She would came back with tears, which made her great eyes so lovely that he could only just restrain himself from taking her into his arms; and she would brush away the tears and smile, and, sitting apart, they would be joined in their high sorrow, made one in a passion of abnegation. But he could not leave the house. Each knew that when he did leave it must be forever. They were agreed upon the impossibility of a continued proximity, upon the mockery of a sentimental friendship, and they clung, with weak tenacity to every slipping moment of this concluding interview. In one of their long pauses a clock struck twelve. Muriel started.