CHAPTER II.

A CROWN OF FIRE.

You well might fear, if love's sole claim Were to be happy; but true love Takes joy as solace, not as aim, And looks beyond, and looks above; And sometimes through the bitterest strife first learns to live her highest life.

If then your future life should need A strength my life can only gain Through suffering, or my heart be freed Only by sorrow from some stain, Then you shall give, and I will take, this crown of fire for love's dear sake. A. A. PROCTER.

York Road, Lambeth, is not the most cheerful of thoroughfares; its chief enlivenment consists of the never-ending succession of cabs bound for the Waterloo Station, and its sombre, narrow-windowed houses are eminently dull. Here, however, Donovan took up his abode, and with the advantages of all Stephen Causton's unused books spent the first year of his course. Here he worked early and late; here he practised plain living and high thinking; here he struggled, fought, and doubted.

In spite of many drawbacks, however, this first year of real work was one of the most contented years he had ever spent; he had great powers of application, in spite of his desultory education, and he worked now with a will--worked with no let or hindrance, for duty was plainly marked out for him, and he had comparatively few temptations or distractions. After the excitement of the successful competition for a scholarship was over, the days and weeks passed by in uneventful monotony, broken occasionally by an unaccountable craving for his old pastime, to be fought with and conquered, or by one of those darker times in his inner life, when the sense of incompleteness, the oppression of the impenetrable veil which shrouded him in ignorance, outweighed his hope, and left him a prey to blank despondency. From such interruptions he would free himself by an effort of will, and resuming his work, became after each struggle more absorbed and interested in it.

Then, too, the thought of Gladys was never far from him; her memory filled his solitude, and made it no longer solitary; her sunshiny face haunted his dull rooms, and made their unloveliness lovely. Had Donovan been at all given to self-scrutiny, had he ever analysed his feelings or followed out the dim glory of the present into a possible future, he would have realised at once the insuperable barrier which lay between him and his love; but he lived in the present--lived, and worked, and loved, and lacking the dangerous habit of self-inspection, he drifted on, happily unconscious that he was nearing the rapids.

But that brief happiness, heralding as it did a sharp awaking and a terrible void, did a great deal for him; it gave him a momentary insight into the "Beauty and the blessedness of life," and it made his ideal of womanhood a lofty ideal. The truest of truths is, that in nature there is no waste, and in regretting what seems like prodigality, we sometimes forget those hidden results which are none the less real and vital because they lie deep down beneath the surface.

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways."

At length, when the summer days were growing long, and London was becoming intolerably hot, when even congenial work became a species of drudgery, and "much study a weariness of the flesh," the hospital term ended, and Donovan, who had promised to spend the long vacation with the Tremains, set off for Porthkerran.

Very natural and home-like did the little Cornish village seem, and, after his long months of solitude, the bright, merry family life was delightful. Nesta had grown, but was still the household baby, and not yet able to say her g's; the two schoolboys were at home for the holidays, and made the house unusually noisy; the doctor had added photography to his many hobbies, and Mrs. Tremain, with the cares of half the village on her mind, seemed still as ready as ever to sympathise with everyone.

And Gladys?

Gladys was changed. Donovan felt that at once. Her eyes seemed to have deepened, she was less talkative, she was even a little shy with him. The last time he had returned to Porthkerran she had greeted him with delighted warmth, had called him by his Christian name. This time she was very quiet and wholly undemonstrative, and when her face was in repose there lurked about it a shade of wistfulness--almost of sadness. She had not lost her characteristic sunshine of manner, but the sunshine was no longer constant, and often grave shadows of thought stole over her fair face. No one but a very close observer would have noticed the change in her, but Donovan, who was always very much alive to the traces of character revealed in manner and expression, felt at once that the Gladys he met at the beginning of that long vacation was not the Gladys he had left in October. Her mind had grown and expanded, but what had brought that shade of sadness to her face? Her life was apparently so cloudless, what unknown source of anxiety could there be to trouble her?

From the very first evening that question lay in his mind, but only as a wonder, not as an anxiety. It was all so peaceful and satisfying here at Porthkerran, he could not brood over anything as he might have done had he been alone. The happiness of being near Gladys blinded him for the time to everything else, the very doubts and questionings which beset him at every turn in his ordinary life seemed left behind; for one delicious month he was supremely happy. He drove out with the doctor, played lawn tennis, romped with the children, gave Gladys lessons in Euclid, read, walked, boated with her, for it invariably happened that, although they went out a large party, the boys and the younger children kept pretty much to themselves, leaving Donovan and Gladys to almost daily _tête-à-têtes_.

If Gladys had been an ordinary girl, Donovan would probably have seen far sooner all the dangers of their present intercourse; but she was so simple-minded and maidenly, so entirely void of all desire to draw attention to herself, that it seemed the most natural thing in the world to make her his confidante. Who was so quick to sympathise with him as his ideal? Was it not right that he should tell her of his difficulties, his interests, his schemes for the future? If their conversation had ever even bordered on sentiment he might have realised that he was putting her in a false position, but it never