And yet, after all, what did it matter, what difference would it make?  A little nearer, a little further, how could it alter things for either of them?  How lessen the impassable gulf between her and him?  It was in the natural course of things that he must meet her at times; there would be the stereotyped greeting, the averted glance, the cold shake of hands that could never hope to meet without a pang; these things were almost inevitable for them.  A little oftener or a little seldomer, would it matter very much then?

Maurice did not think it would; bound as he was to the woman whom he had made his wife—­tied to her by every law of God and of man, of honour, and of manly feeling—­that there should be any actual danger to be run by the near proximity of the woman he had loved, did not even enter into his head.  If he had known how to do his duty towards Helen before he had married her, would he not tenfold know how to do so now?  Possibly he over-rated his own strength; for, however high are our principles, however exalted is our sense of honour—­after all, we are but mortals, and unspeakably weak at the very best.

It did not in any case occur to him to look at the question from Vera’s point of view.  It is never easy for a man to put himself into a woman’s place, or to enter into the extra sensitiveness of soul with which she is endowed.

So it was that he agreed to go straight back to Kynaston, and to make the old house his permanent home according to his wife’s wishes.

It was whilst the newly-married couple were passing through Switzerland on their homeward journey that they suddenly came across Mr. Herbert Pryme, who had been performing a melancholy and solitary pilgrimage in the land of tourists.

It was at the table d’hote at Vevay, upon coming down to that lengthy and untempting repast, chiefly composed of aged goats and stringy hens, which the inventive Swiss waiter exalts, with the effort of a soaring imagination, into “Chamois,” and “Salmi de Poulet,” that Captain and Mrs. Kynaston, who had scarcely recovered from a passage of arms in the seclusion of their bed-chamber, suddenly descried a familiar face amongst the long array of uncongenial people ranged down either side of the table.

What the print of a hob-nailed boot must be to the lonely traveller across the desert, what the sight of a man from one’s own club going down Pall Mall is in mid-September, or as a draught of Giesler’s ’68 to an epicure who has been about to perish on ginger-beer—­so did Herbert Pryme’s face shine upon Maurice Kynaston out of the arid waste of that Vevay salle-a-manger.

In England he had been only an acquaintance—­at Vevay he became his most intimate friend.  The delight of having a man to speak to, and a man who knew others of his friends, was almost intoxicating.  To think of getting one evening—­nay, one hour of liberty from that ever-present chain of matrimonial intercourse which was galling him so sorely, was a bliss for which he could hardly find words to express his gratitude.