When those terrible thoughts would come, and the darkness about him grow billowy with black flame, "God help me," he would cry, "to make the buffeted angel forget the past!" They had talked of Mary more than once, and Godfrey, in part through what Hesper told him of her, had come to see that he was unjust to her.
I do not mean he had come to know the depth and extent of his injustice--that would imply a full understanding of Mary herself, which was yet far beyond him.

A thousand things had to grow, a thousand things to shift and shake themselves together in Godfrey's mind, before he could begin to understand one who cared only for the highest.
Godfrey and Hesper made a glorious pair to look at--but would theirs be a happy union ?--Happy, I dare say--and not too happy.

He who sees to our affairs will see that the _too_ is not in them.

There were fine elements in both, and, if indeed they loved, and now I think, from very necessity of their two hearts, they must have loved, then all would, by degrees, by slow degrees, most likely, come right with them.
If they had been born again both, before they began, so to start fresh, then like two children hand in hand they might have run in through the gates into the city.

But what is love, what is loss, what defilement even, what are pains, and hopes, and disappointments, what sorrow, and death, and all the ills that flesh is heir to, but means to this very end, to this waking of the soul to seek the home of our being--the life eternal?
Verily we must be born from above, and be good children, or become, even to our self-loving selves, a scorn, a hissing, and an endless reproach.
If they had had but Mary to talk to them! But they did not want her: she was a good sort of creature, who, with all her disagreeableness, meant them well, and whom they had misjudged a little and made cry! They had no suspicion that she was one of the lights of the world--one of the wells of truth, whose springs are fed by the rains on the eternal hills.
Turning a clump of furze-bushes on the common, they met Mary.