As he went on intoning the sonorous sentences with half his attention, Wolf seemed to see himself, under those imaginary strictures, reduced to the meanness of a cowardly hypocrite. His mother’s hard, gallant voice joined in the chorus. “I have only one word for you, Wolf,” he heard her say, “and that is contempt!”

But underneath all these fanciful upbraidings, underneath the real comfort of his chanting of Hydriotaphia , there steadily went on gathering itself together, in the subsoil of Wolf’s being, a certain obstinate recovery of his secret soul.

“It was my snatching at you like that,” he whispered to Christie, in an unspoken dialogue, “that was the wicked thing! I should have made you far more unhappy if I hadn’t seen that face. That face saved us both, and Gerda too!”