Through Beatrice Father Robertson had gained an insight into Dion’s love, and into another love, too; but of that he scarcely allowed himself even to think.  There are purities so intense that, like fire, they burn those who would handle them, however tenderly.  About Beatrice Father Robertson felt that he knew something he dared not know.  Indeed, he was hardly sincere about that matter with himself.  Perhaps this was his only insincerity.

With his friend, Canon Wilton, too, he had spoken of Rosamund, and had found himself in the presence of a sort of noble anger.  Now, in his little room, as he knelt in meditation, he remembered a saying of the Canon’s, spoken in the paneled library at Welsley:  “Leith has a great heart.  When will his wife understand its greatness?”

Father Robertson pressed his thin hands upon his closed eyes.  He longed for guidance and he felt almost distressed.  Rosamund had submitted herself to him, had given herself into his hands, but tacitly she had kept something back.  She had never permitted him to direct her in regard to her relation with her husband.  It was in regard to her relation with God that she had submitted herself to him.

How grotesque that was!

Father Robertson’s face burned.

Before Rosamund had come to him she had closed the book of her married life with a frantic hand.  And Father Robertson had left the book closed.  He saw his delicacy now as cowardice.  In his religious relation with Rosamund he had been too much of a gentleman!  When Mrs. Leith, Beatrice, Canon Wilton had appealed to him, he had said that he would do what he could some day, but that he felt time must be given to Rosamund, a long time, to recover from the tremendous shock she had undergone.  He had waited.  Something imperative had kept him back from ever going fully with Rosamund into the question of her separation from her husband.  He had certainly spoken of it, but he had never discussed it, had never got to the bottom of it, although he had felt that some day he must be quite frank with her about it.

Some day!  No doubt he had been waiting for a propitious moment, that moment which never comes.  Or had his instinct told him that anything he could say upon that subject to Rosamund would be utterly impotent, that there was a threshold his influence could not cross?  Perhaps really his instinct had told him to wait, and he was not a moral coward.  For to strive against a woman’s deep feeling is surely to beat against the wind.  When men do certain things all women look upon them with an inevitable disdain, as children being foolish in the dark.

Had he secretly feared to seem foolish in Rosamund’s eyes?

He wondered, genuinely wondered.

On the following morning he wrote to Rosamund and asked her to come to the vicarage at any hour when she was free.  He had something important to say to her.  She answered, fixing three-thirty.  Exactly at that time she arrived in Manxby Street and was shown into Father Robertson’s study.