But Lancelot knew better, and marked her for his own.

And daily his self-confidence and sense of rightful power developed, and with them, paradoxical as it may seem, the bitterest self-abasement.

The contact of her stainless innocence, the growing certainty that the destiny of that innocence was irrevocably bound up with his own, made him shrink from her whenever he remembered his own guilty career.

To remember that there were passages in it which she must never know--that she would cast him from her with abhorrence if she once really understood their vileness?
To think that, amid all the closest bonds of love, there must for ever be an awful, silent gulf in the past, of which they must never speak!--That she would bring to him what he could never, never bring to her!--The thought was unbearable.

And as hideous recollections used to rise before him, devilish caricatures of his former self, mopping and mowing at him in his dreams, he would start from his lonely bed, and pace the room for hours, or saddle his horse, and ride all night long aimlessly through the awful woods, vainly trying to escape himself.