He was a little exalted by his resolve, and spiritual pride began to show itself; so utterly impossible is it that the purest self-devotion should be, if we may use the word, chemically pure.  It is very doubtful if he ever fully realised what he was doing, just as it is doubtful whether in the time of liveliest conviction there has been a perfect realisation of the world to come.  Had he really appreciated the words “torment” and “infinite;” had he really put into “torment” the pangs of a cancer or a death through thirst; had he really put twenty years into “infinity,” he would perhaps have recoiled.  Nevertheless, the fact remains that this man by some means or other had educated himself into complete self-obliteration for the sake of his child.  The present time is disposed to over-rate the intellectual virtues.  No matter how unselfish a woman may be, if she cannot discuss the new music or the new metaphysical poetry, she is nothing and nobody cares for her.  Centuries ago our standard was different, and it will have to be different again.  We shall, it is to be hoped, spend ourselves not in criticism of the record of the saints who sat by the sepulchre, but we shall love as they loved.

Michael comforted himself by a piece of sophistry.  He had made up his mind to attempt a stratagem, a wicked lie, if we choose to call it so, for his son’s sake, and he was prepared to suffer the penalty for it.  If he had thought that in thus sinning he was sinning as an ordinary sinner, he perhaps could not have dared to commit the crime; he could not have faced the Almighty’s displeasure.  But he thought that, although bound by the Divine justice to mete out to him all the punishment which the sin merited, God would, nevertheless, consider him as a sinner for His glory.

One evening—­the summer had not yet departed—­father and son walked out to the house on the cliff.

“Robert,” said Michael suddenly, and with the strength of a man who gathers himself up to do what for a long time he has been afraid to do, and is even bolder apparently than if he had known no fear, “I have spoken my mind to you as God in heaven bade me about Miss Shipton, and this is the last word I shall say.  He knows that I have prayed for you from your childhood up—­that I have prayed that, above everything, he would grant that you should have one of His own for your wife, who should bring up your children in the fear of the Lord.  He alone knows how I have wrestled for you day and night, ay, in the dark hours of the night; for you are my only son, and I looked that you and she whom God might choose for you should be the delight and support of my old age.  But it is not to be.  God has, for His own good purposes, not blessed me as He has blessed others, and the home for which I hoped I am not to have.  Oh, my son, my son!” He had meant to say more, but at the moment he could not.

“Father, father!” said Robert, much moved—­the anger he usually felt at his father’s references to Susan Shipton melting into pity—­“why not? why not?  You don’t know Susan; you condemn her just because she don’t go to our meeting.  She shall love you like your own child.”