“When we’ve once gone we will never, never come back again,” she said.

“No.  We burnt our ships in that blaze, Moll.  Do you mind very much?”

“No.  I shall never want to see it again.  In our new house we won’t have anything to remind us of this.”

“No, we’ll have everything brand new, won’t we?”

“Yes, brand new.”  She looked round her and smiled.  “But it seems a little sad, don’t you think?  It was a pretty room, and there were all my things.”

“Never mind.  Plenty more where they came from.”

They paused in the doorway.

“Ha!  This is the way,” said he, “that a bride used to be brought into her husband’s house.  They lifted her up so!” As he spoke he raised her high in his strong arms.  He was smiling, glorying in his strength.

And that was the way Mrs. Nevill Tyson was carried over the threshold of the New Life.  Or was it not rather her spirit that had lifted his?  He too, unworthy, soiled and shamed with sin, had been suffered to go with her a little way.  For one luminous perfect moment he stood face to face with her in the mystic marriage-chamber of the soul; he heard—­if it were only for a moment—­the unspeakable epithalamium; he saw incomprehensible things.

It had needed some violent appeal to the senses, the spectacle or idea of physical agony, to rouse him to that first passion of pity and tenderness.  Something like this he had felt once before, in the night watch at Thorneytoft, when the wife he had wronged lay in the clutches of life and death.  But now, for the first time in his married life, he loved her.  Surely this was the way of peace.

Surely, surely.  She lay down in her gladness and prayed the prayer of her wedding-night:  that God would make her a good wife.  She did not pray that Nevill might be made a good husband; of his sins she had never spoken, not even to her God.

As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, in the joy of his heart he thanked whatever gods there might happen to be for his unconquerable soul.

CHAPTER XVII

THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL

Three weeks and they were still in London.  If they could only have risen up in the morning of the New Life, and turned their backs on that hateful flat forever!  But, seeing that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was tired out with her journey from one room to the other, it looked as if the greater removal was hardly to be thought of yet.  The doctor was consulted.

“I must examine the heart,” said the man of science.

He examined the heart.

“Better wait another week,” he said, shortly.  Brevity is the soul of medical wit; he was a very eminent man, and time also was short.