But the external view, he realised, was nothing to him to-night.  On that last day he had penetrated beneath the shallow surface of the conventions, and he had read in her tormented heart the whole story of the bitter disillusionment which she did not dare to put in words.  Her imagination, he saw, had created an ideal lover in Kemper’s shape, and in the moment of her awakening she had turned away not from the falsehood, but from the truth.  “Though he is not what I loved yet I will still love him!” her heart had cried, in a subjection to the old false feminine belief that faithfulness to a mistaken ideal is not weakness but virtue.  Yet in the end she had fled from that ultimate choice between the higher and the lower nature.  How could she have lived on a lie when her spirit had forged so clear a path of truth before her?

Rising from his chair he walked for a few minutes rapidly up and down the room.  How far or how near was she to-night?  Had she remembered him in her misery?  Would God reveal Himself to her in the most terrible hour?  His trust in her final deliverance was so great that even as he put the questions, he knew in his heart that she was one of those who, in the end, “win their own souls through perseverance.”  His eyes fell on her picture above his desk, and then turning away rested on Connie’s which stood where he had placed it in the first years of his marriage.  Connie and her life with him was like a half-forgotten dream to him now, yet, looking back upon it, he could not tell himself that there had been for him no gain of strength, for Connie no growth of understanding, in the pitiless failure of their marriage.  All was softened in his memory by that last afternoon when he had seen the shame of experience wiped from her face as they combed her hair straight back from her forehead in the old childish fashion; and he had realised from that instant that a soul had come to birth in the hour before her death.  A single ray of the divine light had dispelled the thick darkness, and her blind eyes were opened for one minute before she closed them to the body forever.  Was that one minute not worth every heart throb he had suffered and every difficult hope for which he had battled in his thoughts?  Having looked though for a fleeting glimpse only upon the unity of life, was not her spirit’s growth measured in the instant of that flashing vision?  For God had worked here—­had worked in the pity of his heart, as well as in the awakening gratitude in Connie’s; and because of the deeper insight he had attained, he could look back over the whole sordid tragedy and discern one of those steep and arduous roads by which the spirit mounts to enlightenment through the flesh.  And if this were so here—­if in ugliness such as this he could find beauty, was it not one and the same over the broad field of human effort?  Had not his own life proved to him that let a man’s eyes be opened, and even in the depths of abasement he may look in his soul and discover God?