He was now forty-five years old; he mourned the loss of his comrade, a gentle, loving woman, whom, though she seldom understood his views of life, his moods and his aims, he had held in affection and esteem.  For eight years he went his way alone; then, chancing to be at a seaside place in the north of England, he made the acquaintance of a mother and daughter who kept a circulating library, and in less than six months the daughter became Mrs. Otway.  Aged not quite thirty, tall, graceful, with a long, pale face, distinguished by its air of meditative refinement, this lady probably never made quite clear to herself her motives in accepting the wooer of fifty-three, whose life had passed in labours and experiences with which she could feel nothing like true sympathy.  Perhaps it was that she had never before received offer of marriage; possibly Jerome’s eloquent dark eyes, of which the gleam was not yet dulled, seconded the emotional language of his lips, and stirred her for the moment to genuine feeling.  For a few months they seemed tolerably mated, then the inevitable divergence began to show itself.  Jerome withdrew into his reveries, became taciturn, absorbed himself at length in the study of Dante; Mrs. Otway, resenting this desertion, grew critical, condemnatory, and, as if to atone for her union with a man who stood outside all the creeds, developed her mild orthodoxy into a peculiarly virulent form of Anglican puritanism.  The only thing that kept them together was their common inclination for a retired existence, and their love of the northern moorland.

Looking back upon his marriages, the old man wondered sadly.  Why had he not—­he who worshipped the idea of womanhood—­sought patiently for his perfect wife?  Somewhere in the world he would have found her, could he but have subdued himself to the high seriousness of the quest.  In a youthful poem, he had sung of Love as “the crown of life,” believing it fervently; he believed it now with a fervour more intense, because more spiritual.  That crown he had missed, even as did the multitude of mankind.  Only to the elect is it granted—­ the few chosen, where all are called.  To some it falls as if by the pure grace of Heaven, meeting them as they walk in the common way.  Some, the fewest, attain it by merit of patient hope, climbing resolute until, on the heights of noble life, a face shines before them, the face of one who murmurs “Guardami ben!”

He thought much, too, about his offspring.  The two children of his first marriage he had educated on the approved English model, making them “gentlemen.”  Partly because he knew not well how else to train them, for Jerome was far too weak on the practical side to have shaped a working system of his own—­a system he durst rely upon; and partly, too, because they seemed to him to inherit many characteristics from their mother, and so to be naturally fitted for some conventional upper-class career.  The result was grievous failure.  In the case of Piers, he