"Yes, that's just it. It fairly breaks me to feel that I have given her up, perhaps, only to sorrow and neglect."
"You can't tell about that, Tristram," said Dormer very gravely. "When you resigned her, you gave her absolutely into the hands of God, and that means you gave her as you would give yourself, for joy or for sorrow. It has always seemed to me that it is quite possible for vicarious resignation to the Divine Will to be a higher thing than the resignation of oneself; certainly it can be a harder.... And, besides," he went on after a moment's pause, "I have something more to say. I have a favourite theory of my own. That rather hackneyed phrase of two people being made for one another is capable of another interpretation. It may mean that from all eternity Providence has intended two souls to meet to play upon each other, and that it is only through the discipline of married life that they can become what God intended them to become. I should never think of any two people as necessarily destined to happiness, but as destined by their union to work out God's Will. After all, what have any of us to do with happiness?"
There was a long silence. Tristram lay back in his chair, and Dormer looked as if he were thinking that the two souls in question would perhaps be the better for any kind of discipline. But at last he said:
"To go back to what you said this morning, that you wanted her more than you have ever wanted her in your life—"
"Yes?"
"The more I think of it the more I believe you to be experiencing the inevitable struggle after the sacrifice has been made. Even our Lord knew what that was."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing was wanting to the completeness of the sacrifice when He offered the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, and yet—afterwards—came the Agony in the Garden."
(5)
That night again his bedroom fire was the companion of Dormer's vigil. He sat long before it, thinking of all that Tristram had told him. He had always had a high ideal for his friend, but now he had even a higher, for he could not help the conviction that God was dealing specially with him, and that disappointment meant that He had some particular work for him to do. But he saw that Tristram had still a hard fight before him, for though he was, perhaps, tormenting himself unnecessarily about his feelings, yet if he was to become what Dormer believed, more and more, that God meant him to be, his loss must be turned from mere endurance into the painful joy of sacrifice. He guessed that it was possible for a soul fully to submit, and yet to fret, and that such an one would for the time lie beyond the reach of consolation.