So a single kiss wrought on this loving nature, that it had for her the tragic sanctity of a pledge. It did not matter how extenuated by good resolutions. The fire once kindled would not so be quenched. Nor would the cold water these two engaged themselves to throw on their own heart-burnings have any effect but to make the heat glow presently the fiercer. That is a mere chemical commonplace, and, unless love is to be accepted for something other than a matter of gases and combustion, follows of necessity. Fire, to be put out by water, must be put out, and not simply fed. It is true that, in the first of the reaction from that madness, they had both shrunk back aghast over the magnitude of the peril they had touched and escaped. Yet the very sympathy engendered of that common fright was fatal. It constituted between them a secret which by habit became a tender and a passionate one. Whatever distance was affected in their relations, there was that knowledge to obliterate it. They were at all times and in all places conscious of it and of one another. And so, what was to be the end? An idle problem. If love could think of ends and retributions, love would not be love but sanity. They continued to meet--were they not expected to meet? That was the mortal irony of it all. Omnipotence laid no embargo on their friendship--applauded and encouraged it, rather. The signs of their better understanding filled the old _gouvernante_ with jubilation. “He comes to vindicate my belief in him,” she wrote to the duke. “In a little you will find the girl converted to your wishes.” And Tiretta? He did not succumb without a struggle. He hated his own treachery, but he could not hate himself, so sanctified of that idyllic passion. For long he fought desperately to command his own humorous, philosophical, independent view of things--to remain “the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.” And all the time he knew that his only resource lay in flight; and he said to himself, “I await no more than her dismissal.” But she never spoke the word that was to banish him and kill his heart, and he said, “To abandon her unbidden, to leave her to bear the brunt of this alone, were to play the part of a coward.” Specious, perhaps; yet in a measure the truth; only that his own defences weakened while he lingered. And then at length he could battle no more, but, spent and exhausted, gave up the struggle. He was like a man who, having swum too far from shore in a tide-race, and seeking to return, grows slowly and agonisingly conscious of the futility of his efforts, and yields himself first to despair and then to resignation, keeping no more than afloat as he drifts out into the unknown. He had done his best, but the tide was too strong for him. Let those who had committed him to the effort take upon their own consciences the result.