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.

Nesta’s promising soprano, and her mother’s contralto, and his baritone—­a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate notes—­should be rising in spirited union with the curtain of that secret:  there was matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation in it.  And during the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once cast thought on a secret so palpitating, the cause of the morning’s expedition and a long year’s prospect of the present day!  It seemed to have been knocked clean out of it—­punctilioed out, Fenellan might say.  Nor had any combinations upon the theme of business displaced it.  Just before the fall, the whole drama of the unfolding of that secret was brilliant to his eyes as a scene on a stage.

He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more than the feeling of a thought;—­what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define as feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic globule:  and a playful fancy may do that or anything.  Only, Sanity does not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.