Rosamund had gradually come to feel that Robin had been taken out of her arms for some great, though hidden, reason.  And because of this feeling she was learning to endure his loss with a sort of resignation.  She often thought that perhaps she had been allowed to have this consolation because she had made an immense effort.  When Robin died she had driven Dion, who had killed her child, out of her life, but she had succeeded in saying to God, “Thy will be done!” She had said it at first as a mere formula, had repeated it obstinately again and again, without meaning it at all, but trying to mean it, meaning to mean it.  She had made a prodigious, a truly heroic effort to conquer her powerfully rebellious nature, and, in this effort, she had been helped by Father Robertson.  He knew of the anger which had overwhelmed her when her mother had died, of how she had wished to hurt God.  He knew that, with bloody sweat, she had destroyed that enemy within her.  She had wished to submit to the will of God when Robin had been snatched from her, and at last she had actually submitted.  It was a great triumph of the spirit.  But perhaps it had left her exhausted.  At any rate she had never been able to forgive God’s instrument, her husband.  And so she had never been able to know the peace of God which many of these women by whom she was surrounded knew.  In her misery she contemplated their calm.  To labor and to pray—­that seemed enough to many of them, to most of them.  She had known calm in the garden at Welsley; in the Sisterhood she knew it not.

The man who was always with her assassinated calm.  She felt strangely from a distance the turmoil of his spirit.  She knew of his misery occultly.  She did not deduce it from her former knowledge of what he was.  And his suffering made her suffer in a terrible way.  He was her victim and she was his.

Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.

In the Sisterhood Rosamund had learnt, always against her will and despite the utmost effort of her obstinacy, the uselessness of that command; she had learnt that those whom God hath really joined together cannot be put asunder by man—­or by woman.  Dion had killed her child, but she had not been able to kill what she was to Dion and what Dion was to her.  Through the mingling of their two beings there had been born a mystery which was, perhaps, eternal like the sound of the murmur in the pine trees above the Valley of Olympia.

She could not trample it into nothingness.

At first, after the tragedy of which Robin had been the victim, Rosamund had felt a horror of Dion which was partly animal.  She had fled from him because she had been physically afraid of him.  He had been changed for her from the man who loved her, and whom she loved in her different way, into the slayer of her child.  She knew, of course, quite well that Dion was not a murderer, but nevertheless she thought of him as one thinks of a murderer.  The