mother revealed Hubert Eldon’s unworthiness, her emotional life had suffered a slow change.  Evil, previously known but as a dark mystery shadowing far-off regions, had become the constant preoccupation of her thoughts.  Drawing analogies from the story of her faith, she imaged Hubert as the angel who fell from supreme purity to a terrible lordship of perdition.  Of his sins she had the dimmest conception; she was told that they were sins of impurity, and her understanding of such could scarcely have been expressed save in the general language of her prayers.  Guarded jealously at every moment of her life, the world had made no blur on the fair tablet of her mind; her Eden had suffered no invasion.  She could only repeat to herself that her heart had gone dreadfully astray in its fondness, and that, whatsoever it cost her, the old hopes, the strength of which was only now proved, must be utterly uprooted.  And knowing that, she wept.

Sin was too surely sorrow, though it neared her only in imagination.  In a few weeks she seemed to have almost outgrown girlhood; her steps were measured, her smile was seldom and lacked mirth.  The revelation would have done so much; the added and growing trouble of Mutimer’s attentions threatened to sink her in melancholy.  She would not allow it to be seen more than she could help; cheerful activity in the life of home was one of her moral duties, and she strove hard to sustain it.  It was a relief to find herself alone each night, alone with her sickness of heart.

The repugnance aroused in her by the thought of becoming Mutimer’s wife was rather instinctive than reasoned.  From one point of view, indeed, she deemed it wrong, since it might be entirely the fruit of the love she was forbidden to cherish.  Striving to read her conscience, which for years had been with her a daily task and was now become the anguish of every hour, she found it hard to establish valid reasons for steadfastly refusing a man who was her mother’s choice.  She read over the marriage service frequently.  There stood the promise—­to love, to honour, and to obey.  Honour and obedience she might render him, but what of love?  The question arose, what did love mean?  Could there be such a thing as love of an unworthy object?  Was she not led astray by the spirit of perverseness which was her heritage?

Adela could not bring herself to believe that ‘to love’ in the sense of the marriage service and to ‘be in love’ as her heart understood it were one and the same thing.  The Puritanism of her training led her to distrust profoundly those impulses of mere nature.  And the circumstances of her own unhappy affection tended to confirm her in this way of thinking.  Letty Tew certainly thought otherwise, but was not Letty’s own heart too exclusively occupied by worldly considerations?

Yet it said ‘love.’  Perchance that was something which would come after marriage; the promise, observe, concerned the future.  But she was not merely indifferent; she shrank from Mutimer.