That hope seemed not too high, face to face with the woman who was doing her best to shatter it. It sustained him while he was fighting her fascination--successfully, as he told himself; while he was dragging his weakness in a wounded sort of triumph, out of her reach; while he was hurrying his things on board the day after. But there, unluckily, his victory ended. Seated apathetically in a deck-chair on the _Candia_, watching the long coast slip by from Thanet to the Lizard, the leaden turmoil of the Channel, and then the clouded purples of the Kerry Hills, he learnt how superficial was his advantage, how deeply he was in bondage. He had, indeed, got out from England, but he had brought so little of himself away that it seemed an impertinence to offer it to any woman in marriage. His heart--or at least what in such affairs is called the heart--and all those cravings of the body which go with the heart were, and would remain, in Laura Marten's keeping. She was right in every boast of her dominion over him. She was the woman for whom he had not waited, of whom long ago he had despaired. The woman who could have satisfied him body and soul, absorbing his desires, inspiring his dreams. No partiality in the past had persuaded him to imagine that of any woman he had admired. They were just what they were--dainty, lovely, brilliant, bewitching; but nothing more to him than to any one who had a taste for them. But here at last was the woman made for him, mad for him: warm with that fugitive spirit of sense which was in her only and for him alone. He knew that, though he knew not how he knew it, as certainly, as responsively as a lock knows the wards of its key. It was as a key that she had entered him; and within him, at her moving, the levers of a secret life had stirred--a strange new complexity of being which no mortal influence had disturbed before. She had revealed to him all that life had not yielded him, all that now it could never yield, a correlation undreamed of between man and woman. And she had come curiously too late. That was his bitterness. He would have sacrificed for her every other allegiance of the past, save this one which brought him no pleasure. From Lettice Nevern he could only come to her as a man debased for ever in his own esteem. Nothing could excuse such a betrayal, nothing could redeem him after it was done. Happiness with the woman he must marry was out of the question; but happiness without her was now for him equally uncompassable. He had a choice only between two sorts of despair. Under such conditions it seemed improbable that he would prove a very cheerful companion, but such predictions were with Caragh especially difficult. His humour was always available for his own misfortunes, and in this case his fortune was too deplorable not to be concealed.