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.