Hester found her lover now very pleasant. If sometimes he struck a jarring chord, she was always able to find some way of accounting for it or explaining it away so far that she was able to go on hoping. Like most self-deceiving women, she was sure she would have greater influence over him as his wife. But where there is not already a far deeper unity than marriage can give, marriage itself can do little to bring two souls together—and may do much to drive them apart. She began to put him in training, as she thought, for the help he was to give her with her loved poor. Lord Gartley had no real conception of her outlook on life, and regarded all her endeavour as born of the desire to perfect his voice and singing.

For Hester the days now passed in pleasure, though I fear the closer contact with Lord Gartley could not help but negatively influence the rate of her growth toward the upper regions. We cannot be heart and soul and self in the company of the untrue without loss. Her prayers were not so fervent, her aspiration not so strong. But the Lord is mindful of his own. He does not forget because we forget. Pain may come, but not because he forgets—nay, just because he does not forget. That is a thing God never does.

There are many women who would have bewitched Gartley more, yet great was his delight in the presence of Hester, and he yielded himself with pleasing grace. Inclined to rebel at times when wearied with her demands on his attention and endeavour, he yet condescended to them with something of the playfulness with which one would humour a child. His turn would come by and by. Then he would instruct her in many things she was now ignorant of. She had never moved in his great world—he must teach her its laws, instruct her how to shine, how to make the most of herself, how to do him honour! He had but the vaguest idea of the folly that possessed her about ministry. He thought of her relation to the poor as but a passing phase of a previously objectless life. That she should even imagine continuing her former pursuits after they were married would have seemed utterly incredible to him. And Hester would have been equally staggered to find that he had so totally failed to understand her after the way she had opened her heart to him. So things went on upon a mutual misunderstanding—each falling more and more in love with the other, while in reality they were separating further and further, each caught up in thoughts and motives that were alien to the other.