"It cannot be that love so deep as mine Could fail to stay you like ethereal wine."
When he first understood the full import of the dreadful story, John Graham had been dazed with grief. He had sought distraction from his torturing thoughts in action, and had spent that first day in wandering through the forest. When he lay down to sleep that night in the lodge, his heart was burdened with the double weight of Millicent’s secret and Millicent’s deceit. He said to himself that they had put an insuperable bar between her and himself. He could have pardoned the disgrace which had befallen her, and was not her fault, but he could never forgive her deceit toward him. The finding of her kerchief the next morning, and the terrible apprehension which the blood-stain had aroused in him, swept away the anger and sorrow from his heart, leaving nothing there but an agonizing fear. This had been, in turn, banished by the joy of finding her alive and unharmed, waiting for him amidst the roses. The great fear had softened the anger in his heart; the sudden happiness exalted his soul from the hell of anguish in which it had dwelt, into a perfect and pure peace. Pride, anger, and resentment were swept away, and love swayed him with its mastery. He knew her now, faulty as she was; and his higher nature forgave her, because of her great love, because of her great wrong. But in his stormy breast the tide of feeling flowed and ebbed; pride had reigned there so long that love could not all at once claim undisputed sway. He could not learn in an instant that pride is born of hell, while love is breathed from heaven. In that strange moment when their two beings had seemed etherealized, he had forgiven her all; but in the days that followed, pride, doubt, and prejudice came forward one by one to do combat with victorious love. It might be that they would conquer in the struggle; it might even be that pride, being selfish, should make him doubt and finally even forget love, which is unselfish. But he had pardoned her, and loved her with all her sins; he had acknowledged that bond of spirit which made them one; he had knelt before her and kissed her feet in a passionless embrace full of reverence. No matter what griefs should fall upon her, no matter what deed or word of his might put them apart in this world, she should carry through her life, and beyond it, the knowledge that what was highest in him had leapt to meet her love, and acknowledged that they belonged each to other for eternity.