but would have congratulated his son on his luck and his prudence.  Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form a blameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every way his moral and mental superior, but in despite of the conventional ban of society, Dr. Merrick had cast him off as an open reprobate.  And why?  Simply because that union was unsanctioned by the exponents of a law they despised, and unblessed by the priests of a creed they rejected.  Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsic moral value of an act such people think about, but the light in which it is regarded by a selfish society.

Unchastity, it has been well said, is union without love; and Alan would have none of it.

He went back to Herminia more than ever convinced of that spotless woman’s moral superiority to every one else he had ever met with.  She sat, a lonely soul, enthroned amid the halo of her own perfect purity.  To Alan, she seemed like one of those early Italian Madonnas, lost in a glory of light that surrounds and half hides them.  He reverenced her far too much to tell her all that had happened.  How could he wound those sweet ears with his father’s coarse epithets?

They took the club train that afternoon to Paris.  There they slept the night in a fusty hotel near the Gare du Nord, and went on in the morning by the daylight express to Switzerland.  At Lucerne and Milan they broke the journey once more.  Herminia had never yet gone further afield from England than Paris; and this first glimpse of a wider world was intensely interesting to her.  Who can help being pleased, indeed, with that wonderful St. Gothard—­the crystal green Reuss shattering itself in white spray into emerald pools by the side of the railway; Wasen church perched high upon its solitary hilltop; the Biaschina ravine, the cleft rocks of Faido, the serpentine twists and turns of the ramping line as it mounts or descends its spiral zigzags?  Dewy Alpine pasture, tossed masses of land-slip, white narcissus on the banks, snowy peaks in the background—­all alike were fresh visions of delight to Herminia; and she drank it all in with the pure childish joy of a poetic nature.  It was the Switzerland of her dreams, reinforced and complemented by unsuspected detail.

One trouble alone disturbed her peace of mind upon that delightful journey.  Alan entered their names at all the hotels where they stopped as “Mr. and Mrs. Alan Merrick of London.”  That deception, as Herminia held it, cost her many qualms of conscience; but Alan, with masculine common-sense, was firm upon the point that no other description was practically possible; and Herminia yielded with a sign to his greater worldly wisdom.  She had yet to learn the lesson which sooner or later comes home to all the small minority who care a pin about righteousness, that in a world like our own, it is impossible for the righteous always to act consistently up to their most sacred convictions.