They crept out of the dark house that had heard them as out of a church.  He was very happy as they went through the high, wide streets that to-night were broad rivers of slow wind.  He was being of use to her; she was leaning on his arm and sometimes shutting her tired eyes and trusting to his guidance.  The very coldness of the air he found pleasing, because it told him that he was in the North, the cruel-kind region of the world which sows seeds from the South in ice-bound earth in which it would seem that they must perish, yet rears them to such fruit and flower as in their own rich soil they never knew.

At the first, he reflected, it must have appeared that the faith they made in Rome would lose all its justifications of beauty when it travelled to those barren lands where the Holy Wafer and the images of Our Lord and Our Lady must be content with a lodging built not of coloured marble but of grey stone.  Yet here the Northmen won.  Since there were no quarries of coloured marble they had to quarry in their minds, and there they found the Gothic style, which made every church like the holiest moment of a holy soul’s aspiration to God, and which is doubtless more pleasing to Him, if He exists to be pleased, than precious stones.

So was it with love.  A man returning from the South, where all women are full of physical wisdom, might think as he looked on these Northern women, with their straight sexless eyes and their long limbs innocent of languor, that he had turned his back on love.  But here again the North was victor.  Since these women could not be wise about life with their bodies, they were wise about love with their souls.  They can give such sacramental kisses as the one that still lay on his lips, committing him for ever to nobility.  Ah, how much she had done for him by being so sweetly militarist!  For it had always been his fear that the supreme passion of his life would be for some woman who, by her passivity, would provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he had inherited from his father.  He had seen that that might easily happen during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been, he knew, more quarrelsome and less friendly to mild and civilising things than he was ordinarily.  But henceforward he was safe, for Ellen would fiercely forbid him to be anything but gentle.  Now that he realised how good their relationship was he wanted it to be perfect, and therefore he felt vexed that he had not yet made it perfectly honest by telling her about his mother.  He resolved to do so there and then, for he felt that that kiss had sealed the evening to a serenity in which pain surely could not live.

“You’re walking slower than you were,” said Ellen sharply.  “What was it you were thinking of saying?”

He answered slowly, “I was thinking of something that I ought to tell you about myself.”

She looked sideways at him as they passed under a lamp, and wrote in her heart, “When the vein stands out in the middle of his forehead I will know that he is worried,” then said aloud, “Och, if it’s anything disagreeable, don’t bother to tell me.  I’ll just take it for granted that till you met me you were a bad character.”