his buoying constituents to outroar them:  and he tells a friend that it was not, as one may say, an error, although an erratic step:  but let us explain to our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried in; a step deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed:  it was a step necessitated (emphatically) by a false preceding step; and having youth to plead for it, in the first instance, youth and ignorance; and secondly, and O how deeply truly!  Love.  Deep true love, proved by years, is the advocate.

He tells himself at the same time, after lending ear to the advocate’s exordium and a favourite sentence, that, judged by the Powers (to them only can he expose the whole skeleton-cupboard of the case), judged by those clear-sighted Powers, he is exonerated.

To be exonerated by those awful Powers, is to be approved.

As to that, there is no doubt:  whom they, all-seeing, discerning as they do, acquit they justify.

Whom they justify, they compliment.

They, seeing all the facts, are not unintelligent of distinctions, as the world is.

What, to them, is the spot of the error?—­admitting it as an error.  They know it for a thing of convention, not of Nature.  We stand forth to plead it in proof of an adherence to Nature’s laws:  we affirm, that far from a defilement, it is an illumination and stamp of nobility.  On the beloved who shares it with us, it is a stamp of the highest nobility.  Our world has many ways for signifying its displeasure, but it cannot brand an angel.

This was another favourite sentence of Love’s grand oration for the defence.  So seductive was it to the Powers who sat in judgement on the case, that they all, when the sentence came, turned eyes upon the angel, and they smiled.

They do not smile on the condemnable.

She, then, were he rebuked, would have strength to uplift him.  And who, calling her his own, could be placed in second rank among the blissful!

Mr. Radnor could rationally say that he was made for happiness; he flew to it, he breathed, dispensed it.  How conceive the clear-sighted celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate?  Not they.  He knew, for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield him subservient responses.  The world, or Puritanic members of it, had pushed him to the trial once or twice—­or had put on an air of doing so; creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his daughter Nesta Victoria:  a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the good example to shine in the sun.

He had a secret for them.