And he believed much the same process had taken place in his mother’s feeling.  She rarely spoke of Kitty; but when she did the doubt and soreness of her mind were plain.  Her own life had grown very solitary.  And in particular the old friendship between her and Polly Lyster had entirely ceased to be.  Lady Tranmore shivered when she was named, and would never herself speak of her if she could help it.  Ashe had tried in vain to make her explain herself.  Surely it was incredible that she could in any way blame Mary for the incident at Verona?  Ashe, of course, remembered the passage in his mother’s letter from Venice, and they had the maid Blanche’s report to Lady Tranmore, of Kitty’s intentions when she left Venice, of her terror when Cliffe appeared—­of her swoon.  But he believed with the Dean that any treacherous servant could have brought about the catastrophe.  Vincenzo, one of the gondoliers who took Kitty to the station, had seen the luggage labelled for Verona; no doubt Cliffe had bribed him; and this explanation was, indeed, suggested to Lady Tranmore by the maid.  His mother’s suspicion—­if indeed she entertained it—­was so hideous that Ashe, finding it impossible to make his own mind harbor it for an instant, was harrowed by the mere possibility of its existence; as though it represented some hidden sore of consciousness that refused either to be probed or healed.

As he labored on against the storm all thought of his present life and activities dropped away from him; he lived entirely in the past.  “What is it in me,” he thought, “that has made the difference between my life and that of other men I know—­that weakened me so with Kitty?” He canvassed his own character, as a third person might have done.

The Christian, no doubt, would say that his married life had failed because God had been absent from it, because there had been in it no consciousness of higher law, of compelling grace.

Ashe pondered what such things might mean.  “The Christian—­in speculative belief—­fails under the challenge of life as often as other men.  Surely it depends on something infinitely more primitive and fundamental than Christianity?—­something out of which Christianity itself springs?  But this something—­does it really exist—­or am I only cheating myself by fancying it?  Is it, as all the sages have said, the pursuit of some eternal good, the identification of the self with it—­the ‘dying to live’?  And is this the real meaning at the heart of Christianity?—­at the heart of all religion?—­the everlasting meaning, let science play what havoc it please with outward forms and statements?”

Had he, perhaps, doubted the soul?

He groaned aloud.  “O my God, what matter that I should grow wise—­if
Kitty is lost and desolate?”

And he trampled on his own thoughts—­feeling them a mere hypocrisy and offence.