There was no use trying to misunderstand her words.  To do so would be foolish, even if it were possible for him to deceive himself, and the rest of her letter mattered nothing to him.  The two little sentences with which she dismissed him were his sole concern; they were the keys to the whole of this correspondence which had beguiled him.  Fool that he had been not to see it!  Alas! we see only what we want to see.  He wandered about the lake, trying to bring himself to hate her.  He even stopped in his walks to address insulting words to her.  Words of common abuse came to his tongue readily, but there was an unconquerable tenderness in his heart always; and one day the thought went by that it was nobler of her to make him suffer than to have meekly forgiven him, as many women would have done, because he was a priest.  He stopped affrighted, and began to wonder if this were the first time her easy forgiveness of his mistake had seemed suspicious.  No, he felt sure that some sort of shadow of disappointment had passed at the back of his mind when he read her first letter, and after having lain for months at the back of his mind, this idea had come to the surface.  An extraordinary perversion, truly, which he could only account for by the fact that he had always looked upon her as being more like what the primitive woman must have been than anybody else in the world; and the first instinct of the primitive woman would be to revenge any slight on her sexual pride.  He had misread her character, and in this new reading he found a temporary consolation.

As he sat thinking of her he heard a mouse gnawing under the boards, and every night after the mouse came to gnaw.  ’The teeth of regret are the same; my life is being gnawed away.  Never shall I see her.’  It seemed impossible that life would close on him without his seeing her face or hearing her voice again, and he began to think how it would be if they were to meet on the other side.  For he believed in heaven, and that was a good thing.  Without such belief there would be nothing for him to do but to go down to the lake and make an end of himself.  But believing as he did in heaven and the holy Catholic Church to be the surest way of getting there, he had a great deal to be thankful for.  Poole’s possession of her was but temporary, a few years at most, whereas his possession of her, if he were so fortunate as to gain heaven, and by his prayers to bring her back to the true fold, would endure for ever and ever.  The wisest thing, therefore, for him to do would be to enter a Trappist monastery.  But our Lord says that in heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, and what would heaven be to him without Nora?  No more than a union of souls, and he wanted her body as well as her soul.  He must pray.  He knew the feeling well—­a sort of mental giddiness, a delirium in the brain; and it increased rapidly, urging him to fall on his knees.  If he resisted, it was because he was ashamed and feared