For two or three days after that startling revelation, Mr. Chillingworth remained almost entirely shut up in his own study. He had truly, as he said, "many things to think of"—past, present and future. Miss Blanchard's few and simple words had been enough to reveal to him, with a lightning flash, the whole situation. The child's name, the likeness that had always vaguely troubled him, the associations and memories it suggested, her uncommon delight in music, all pointed too distinctly in one direction. Yet he had never even heard that he had a child! And he had been so sure that the "Celia Chillingworth," whose name he had himself seen among the "lost" in that great steamship disaster which had caused such a widespread sensation, must have been his unfortunate wife, that he had had no more doubt on the subject than if he had seen her laid in her coffin. He had written to his English agent, and had ascertained through his inquiries, that she had taken passage with her cousin, in the ill-fated steamer. What further certainty could he need?

Undoubtedly the intelligence of her death had been, in some sense, a relief to him. Yet another curious result had followed. This tragic event seemed to have obliterated the impatient disgust which had led to his harsh decision. For Mr. Chillingworth's character possessed none of the passionate impulse to save—the tender sympathy with the wrong-doer—the infinite patience and compassion that mark the human saviour of his fellows, as they do the Divine One, and that are most frequently found in the feminine nature; though Mr. Alden was a conspicuous proof that they are by no means exclusively found there. But death seemed to have passed a softening and idealizing touch over the harsh lines of the past, and his early romance, by degrees, lost its painful aspect, and retained only the romantic one. He had not been conscious of being harsh, and the sorrow he felt was only the natural ruth that any mind of sensibility must feel at the tragic severance of a life, the premature fate that had overtaken one so young and so beautiful. And he had gradually begun to think only of his "bereavement," not of what had gone before. He had never thought of remarriage till he had met Nora Blanchard.

But now, in the light of the peculiar Nemesis that had overtaken him, he could not feel so sure that he had done right! His own moral perceptions, at least, had grown within the last ten years. Originally, they had been very limited. He had been brought up, a much indulged only child, by a widowed mother, who plumed herself on her "evangelical views" and attached infinite importance to what she called the "saving of the soul," meaning by that much abused term, however, little more than a claim to a fair prospect of safety and happiness in another life. She was especially strong on the "deadliness of doing," the worthlessness of "good works." Accordingly, Cecil Chillingworth, though brought up, of course, to avoid open transgression and hate vice, had never in those early days that do so much to mould a man's mind, taken in the idea of the gospel as a great moral cure and spiritual power, the very essence of which must be love to God and man. He bad never been taught that salvation meant becoming Christ-like, and that to follow Christ was to care for others, to deny himself for his brother's good. He had no gross impulses to resist, and, having a natural devotional tendency, he had drifted on in a refined self-indulgence, of which he was quite unconscious. Notwithstanding his evident musical talent, his mother discouraged his becoming a professional musician, from a vague idea that it was "worldly"—a reason quite sufficient to deter himself. The clerical profession was the next most congenial, and he went through his preparation for it in due course, being, however, much more deeply interested in music than in theology, and never having passed through any crisis that could wake him up to spiritual reality. Soon after his taking orders and settling down in a curacy, he had met Celia Travers, and had fallen passionately in love. His mother had died two or three years before, and, as he had only himself to please, and as Miss Travers' employer encouraged a speedy marriage, it had taken place while the spell of her beauty still blinded him to all other considerations. After a time came disillusion to a great extent, a sense of lack of congenial companionship, and then the shock of the last discovery, the shame, and dread, and final separation, which he justified to himself as the "cutting off of the right hand;" although the consequences it was to avert were temporal, not spiritual.

After he came to America, a gradual change and widening of intellectual and spiritual horizon grew with maturing years. He at least learned to see Christianity differently. He caught up the current note of self-sacrifice, self-surrender. He was fascinated with an ideal spiritual beauty which called forth all his natural eloquence, and made him a popular preacher. But he had lived so completely in his ideals, that he had learned to worship these, instead of the realities that inspired them. And his own failure to grasp the practical side of Christianity reacted on his teaching. The beauty of the Christian religion, as he saw it, enchanted his idealistic nature, much as the glory of a distant mountain-top might fascinate the wayfarer, who as yet had but little conception of the long and toilsome journey that lies between. He could, therefore, discourse glowingly on the divine ideal of Christian love, without saying one word which could penetrate the conscience of the most consistently selfish hearer—who will stand calmly a vast amount of generalities, provided, only, that you do not "condescend upon particulars." Moreover, Mr. Chillingworth had lived so completely in a world of his own, so apart from the ordinary human life about him, that he himself did not know the needs of his own people, the points at which their selfishness was strongest, the absolute blank that lay between what they professed to believe and its natural development in the practice of daily life,—a gap, that, as we have seen, unhappily existed in his own life.

In these days of solitary self-communing, conscience, however, began to assert its claims. The fact that other hands had cared for and tended the woman whose chief claim was on him, and the knowledge, from all he had seen of Miss Blanchard, in what light the whole affair and his action in it must appear to her who of late had been so much in his thoughts and hopes—all tended to open his eyes. In looking over some old sermons, in order to select a substitute for the one he could not write, he happened to come upon the one he had been writing on the day when Roland Graeme first made his acquaintance, and his eye chanced to fall on the paragraph in which he had been interrupted. Conscience, newly awakened, drove the shaft home. That "battle" he spoke of—how had he fought it? He could see, though dimly as yet, that the "battle with self" had never been fought at all—and, if so, what of the others? Heartsick and depressed, he felt, for the first time in his life, that he was a moral failure. The consciousness almost drowned the other pang—of a cherished hope shattered forever!

What he should do, he could not yet see. The future seemed all dark before him. To do anything, and to do nothing, seemed to him equally impossible. He could not even bring himself to ask questions, to put into tangible shape the nightmare that haunted him. While still in this miserable state of indecision, a stronger hand solved the question for him.

On the evening on which he heard the startling tidings, his trim maid, when she brought in his tea, asked if she might go to spend the night at her own home, on account of the illness of one of her little brothers. He assented,—mechanically—and she did not think it necessary to tell him that it was a case of diphtheria. Two or three days later, he felt sufficiently indisposed to send for Dr. Blanchard; when he found, to his surprise, that what he had thought an ordinary though severe sore throat was an incipient attack of that dreaded malady.

Dr. Blanchard urgently recommended the hospital, as the only place where he could be properly and safely treated; and he passively assented. Nothing seemed to matter much to him, just then. A cab was called, and the move was made without delay. And so, without any prearrangement, the husband and wife, so long and strangely separated, were once more brought together beneath the same roof.