Now he had to stand up, a desperate creature, and parley with his soul. What was he going to do in this crisis of his affairs? The just, the expiatory thing, since, mercifully, it might be said, heaven had snatched him from his self-delusion in time to make atonement possible? If hitherto the odds against him had been morally overwhelming, here was the psychologic moment of respite, the breathing, the renewing time, when he could still withdraw with some honour to himself. And so, what of her, sacrificed in her innocent trust, like piteous Iphigenia, to appease the anger of the gods? No, it was unthinkable; he was not hero or coward enough to condemn his own soul to that renunciation, let the gods visit his weakness on his head as they would. To go; to let her believe him faithless, spiritless, believe his love, to which she leaned in wistful confidence, a thing of straw? He could not do it, not though reason pointed to it as the wise and noble course. What had he to do with reason, whose bliss had been in defying it? He had sinned to his friend already beyond redemption; would it mend his salvation to play the traitor to his love? O, his love--his beautiful love! If it had been madness before to relinquish that dream, how much more impossible was it now, when loss had made of it an immortal ecstacy, had transported it from earth to heaven, had exalted its little Madonna of the white feet to those starry heights where no breath of gross desire might reach her. Now she belonged to him tenfold by right of that immaculateness; he was jealous of her virgin fame, since she was enthroned there by his will--a tender thing, no longer for the rough wounding of man’s passion. Let her thus dwell for ever in the skies, serene and chaste and adorable. The world was free to kneel with him and worship; though her chosen one, he would demand no closer privilege for himself. But they would not let it be; they had haled her from her heaven, meaning to despoil her; and what alternative had he then but to claim her bodily for his own? Friendship, good faith, policy--what were all these as against his age-long title, the wild mystic compact made in those far green gardens? That was the older, the more binding troth, of which, when he accepted his credentials from the archduke, he had guessed nothing. Now, if honour bound him, it was there. He could not help it if the humour of the thing jumped with his inclination. He would recognise all this sometimes for the casuistry it was; but mostly, so strangely was the mystic in him blended with the rationalist, it would possess his mind with all the force of an actual memory. But it mattered little, after all, with what he chose to salve his conscience, since, angry or half-healed, he found no solution in it of his difficulties.