real and imaginary, while all the time, undesignedly, he was depriving her of the very nerve of self-defense.  He still gave her books—­and good books—­Carlyle even, and Tennyson; read poetry with her, and taught her to read aloud; went to her chapel with her sometimes of a Sunday evening—­for he was then, so he said, and so he imagined, a thorough believer in revelation.  He took her to the theater, to pictures, to concerts, taking every care of her health, her manners, her principles.  But one enemy he forgot to guard her against:  how is a man to protect even the woman he loves from the hidden god of his idolatry—­his own grand contemptible self?

It is needless to set the foot of narration upon every step of the slow-descending stair.  With all his tender feelings and generous love of his kind, Paul Faber had not yet learned the simplest lesson of humanity—­that he who would not be a murderer, must be his brother’s keeper—­still more his sister’s, protecting every woman first of all from himself—­from every untruth in him, chiefly from every unhallowed approach of his lower nature, from every thing that calls itself love and is but its black shadow, its demon ever murmuring I love, that it may devour.  The priceless reward of such honesty is the power to love better; but let no man insult his nature by imagining himself noble for so carrying himself.  As soon let him think himself noble that he is no swindler.  Doubtless Faber said to himself as well as to her, and said it yet oftener when the recoil of his selfishness struck upon the door of his conscience and roused Don Worm, that he would be true to her forever.  But what did he mean by the words?  Did he know?  Had they any sense of which he would not have been ashamed even before the girl herself?  Would such truth as he contemplated make of him her hiding-place from the wind, her covert from the tempest?  He never even thought whether to marry her or not, never vowed even in his heart not to marry another.  All he could have said was, that at the time he had no intention of marrying another, and that he had the intention of keeping her for himself indefinitely, which may be all the notion some people have of eternally.  But things went well with them, and they seemed to themselves, notwithstanding the tears shed by one of them in secret, only the better for the relation between them.

At length a child was born.  The heart of a woman is indeed infinite, but time, her presence, her thoughts, her hands are finite:  she could not seem so much a lover as before, because she must be a mother now:  God only can think of two things at once.  In his enduring selfishness, Faber felt the child come between them, and reproached her neglect, as he called it.  She answered him gently and reasonably; but now his bonds began to weary him.  She saw it, and in the misery of the waste vision opening before her eyes, her temper, till now sweet as devoted, began to change.  And yet, while she loved her child the more passionately that she loved her forebodingly, almost with the love of a woman already forsaken, she was nearly mad sometimes with her own heart, that she could not give herself so utterly as before to her idol.