‘You really believe that?’ asked Harvey, with a serious smile.

‘Why, is it such a heresy?’

’I should rather have thought so.  One is so accustomed to hear the other view I mean, it’s in the air.  Don’t think I’m asking your sympathy.  I have always wished Alma to act on her own judgment; she has been left quite free to do so.  But if the results seem worse than doubtful, then comes the difficulty.’

’To be settled, surely, like all other difficulties between sensible people.’

Mrs. Morton’s faith was of enviable simplicity.  She knew, as a matter of fact, that husbands and wives often found their difficulties insuperable; but why this should be so, seemed to her one of the dark and mournful enigmas of life.  It implied such a lack not only of good sense, but of right feeling.  In her own experience she had met with no doubt, no worry, which did not yield to tact, or generous endeavour, or, at worst, to the creed by which she lived.  One solicitude, and one only, continued to affect her as wife and mother; that it could not overcome her happy temper was due to the hope perpetually inspired by her husband’s love —­ a hope inseparable from her profoundest convictions.  She and Morton differed in religious views, and there had come a grave moment when she asked whether it would be possible to educate her children in her own belief without putting a distance between them and their father.  The doubt had disappeared, thanks to Morton’s breadth of view, or facility of conscience; there remained the trouble in which it had originated, but she solaced herself with the fond assurance that this also would vanish as time went on.  In the same mood of kindly serenity she regarded the lives of her friends, always hoping for the best, and finding it hard to understand that anyone could deliberately act with unkindness, unreasonableness, or any other quality opposed to the common good.

Rolfe had no desire of talking further about his private affairs.  He had made up his mind on the points at issue, and needed no counsel, but the spirit of Mrs. Morton’s conversation helped him to think tranquilly.  The great danger was that he might make things worse by his way of regarding them.  Most unluckily, Alma’s illness had become connected in his imagination with the tragedy of the Carnabys; he could not keep the things apart.  Hugh Carnaby’s miserable doom, and the dark surmises attaching to his wife, doubtless had their part in bringing about a nervous crisis; why could he not recognise this as perfectly natural, and dismiss the matter?  In spite of all reasoning, Alma’s image ever and again appeared to him shadowed by the gloom which involved her friend —­ or the woman who was her friend.  He knew it (or believed it) to be the merest illusion of his perturbed mind; for no fact, how trivial soever, had suggested to him that Alma knew more of the circumstances of Redgrave’s death than she seemed to know.  On the one hand,