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"Perhaps,” she said, with a faint smile, “that is because you have not cared to observe me closely. But I have observed you; and you are changed, at any rate. No, not in your face, for as far as that goes you look fresher than ever, and far less thoughtful-or perhaps it would sound better if I said, thought-worn. Tell me," she added presently, "do you ever write any poetry now?"

"I have written," he said, "a few jingling rhymes for music; but, except that, nothing for five years. But wait, let me beg you wait for a single moment, while I watch the delicious orange-leaves, as they move and murmur over me, against the clear, delicious sky. Let us have a moment's golden silence—as golden as those 'happy, hanging orange-orbs.'"

He leaned back with his face turned upward, and watched with a dreamy intensity the sky, the fruit, and the foliage. "Yes," he exclaimed suddenly, again turning to his companion, who had been watching him as he had been watching the orange-trees; "you are right. I am changed. I have forfeited by this time all claims on the friendship I once had from you. You liked me once because I was young and impetuous, and because I would quote poetry by the hour to you. Now, I have no eagerness, no enthusiasm left in me; and without that there is no poetry possible." "And yet," she said, "you looked happy enough this morning; and, whenever I hear of you, I hear of you as enjoying yourself."

"Ah!" he answered, "but I did not tell you I was miserable. I should be a far more interesting person if I were, both to myself and others. But I have not even energy enough to be embittered or disappointed. Life, I find, is not the thing I thought it was; but I feel no anger at it, because it has deceived me. I merely smile at myself for having been the victim of the deceit. Where is my anger, where is my hate gone? Some of my old spirit would return if I could

only recover these. Can you advise me, Lady Di, how to recover my anger?"

"Would it not be more to the purpose," she said hurriedly, “if you asked how to recover your love? If you had ever been really in love, you would not-"

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Have occasion, you would say, to lament that my disappointment was not bitter enough to me."

"Do not laugh," she said gently, "for I am speaking to you with all earnestness. If you had ever really loved, life would never seem a blank to you. It might, indeed, be bitter; but even in the bitterness there would be something holy; and you would never, never sink to the shallow ennui that you now say oppresses you."

"It is not so," said Marsham, getting more animated; "for I know what love is, and that, too, has failed me. It has failed me like the rest of life, and for the same reason. It is but the fragment of a far greater loss. When you knew me I was full of romance. You little guessed," he added with some feeling, "how full." Lady Di flushed crimson, and her breath came quickly. "But you knew me," he went on, "not, as we both of us thought, in the sunrise of my maturer manhood, but in what really was the sunset of my youth, and of the faith that my youth had lived on."

Lady Di fixed her eyes on him with a look of soft compassion. "My poor friend," she said, "you are very young still, and all this dejection means merely that you have not found the right person. You have lost your faith in God, have you? It is a great misfortune, doubtless. But many true-hearted men and women have suffered the same; and have loved each other none the less, perhaps even the better for it. And your case, if you please, can of course be the same as theirs. If you will only learn of me, I may, I think, be able to help you. I have heard of the life you lead, of the idle selfishness and the frivolity of it; of your perpetual restless search after its shallowest pleasures. I have heard of the people you associate with-of the women like Mrs. Crane, and of the men like Lord Surbiton. I have watched to-day your manner among them; and the picture I had formed of you is, I see, a true one. Yourself, your affections, and your interests are as light as a butterfly's wings, but as weak and as inconstant also. You are moving through the world without one earnest thought to guide, or without one earnest work to anchor you. Is it in that way, do you think, that faith is to be recovered? If you would ever believe in the supernatural, you must first give your affections some stake in the natural. Or," she continued, looking into his eyes inquiringly, "if your hour has not yet come, if you have not yet dis

covered the woman that will wake up all your sleeping manhood, you can at least do what is the other half of your duty—you can work for all those depending on you; you can help to promote their happiness."

"I am a rich man now," said Marsham, "and, as you say, I have many depending on me. But how do you think I behave toward them? To you I seem only an idler, and a pleasure-seeker. You know nothing of the dull and weary hours that I give to business; the dull and weary weeks that I spend at my own place in the country; the petty, wretched details with which I occupy myself, that I may do what is called 'my duty' by all to whom I can be of any help."

"Is this indeed so?" she said. "And do you mean to say that you find no pleasure in the -in the thought that you are making others happy?"

"If I did not do what I could," he said, "I should be certainly miserable. But, to do all I can, does but save me from that, and preserve me on the dull, dead level of painlessness. I am not enthusiastic even about my own life. Why should I be enthusiastic about the lives of others ? "

"You are right," she said "you are right. If you can see nothing in this life worth winning for yourself, and nothing in this life that it would make you miserable to miss, your labors for others will be but the dull round of a treadmill. Our own inner lives and loves must be the light of our world for each of us; and if the light, my friend, that is in us be darkness, oh, how great is that darkness! But I do not yet despair of you. Some day or other, you will learn to love, and then the whole aspect of things will change for you. The old sense of life's worth and solemnity will come back again; you will again be eager, again an enthusiast, and again, perhaps, a poet." "I have told you," said Marsham, "that I have known love already, but it had for me none of that magic power that you give it credit for."

"Tell me," said Lady Di tremulously, "when was that? Was it before you knew me, or was it afterward? You said you were more full of romance when I knew you first than perhaps I suspected."

"I was indeed," said Marsham, "for, the very time I was here, I knew the very feeling that you say would save me, but which in reality has done so very little. I was in love-in love as deeply, as madly, as ever you could recommend me to be."

She looked at him with a bewildered expression. "But why," she said, after a pause, "did you tell me nothing of this? Did I not deserve your confidence? Were you afraid to be quite

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For some moments she was mute. Suddenly the fashion of her countenance changed, as his meaning dawned on her. 'And so," she began, "you were in love with some other woman-with the lady, I mean " (she corrected herself angrily), "who had the honor to lose your affections as soon as she had completed to you the full gift of her confidence! Indeed, Mr. Marsham, if your affections are of that kind, I do not wonder they have failed to reveal the earnestness and value of life to you. And so you flatter yourself you were in love, at that time-really in love, do you? My poor friend, you make me smile to see how you deceive yourself. I should have thought that a schoolboy would have known life better. That poor phase of feeling you were then passing through, I had known and done with three years before. Time was when I left my heart behind me at every country-house I staid at; but it was sure to come after me in a day or two, like a sponge-bag or a washing-bill; and, foolish girl though I was, I never really thought that trifling to be love. Myself, I have never loved. But I know that I know what the passion is, because I am so sure I have never felt it: and so sure also that you have not. Why, at the very time you speak of, were not you loitering here with me, finding pleasure in my society, and hanging over every word I uttered?"

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And why should I not?" said Marsham. "You were a woman of taste and intellect. You had thought, and read, and discriminated, and I could discuss things freely with you that I could with no one else. What, according to your view of the matter, are the contents of a true lover's vows? When he says to a woman, 'I love you,' does that mean also, 'You understand all my thoughts?' or does it else mean, ‘I will never harbor or utter a thought that you are incapable of understanding'? Why, it takes two or three people to understand even the meanest personality. And, because one woman had my genial sympathy, can this show you that another had not my love?"

"Heavens!" she said impetuously, “do you know so little as to think that were a man in love really he could endure to be absent, without necessity, a day from the woman he was in love with? No: he is never happy when away from her. All amusements, unless she shares them, are vapid; and to give to another one of the in

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This is not a matter," she exclaimed, "for reason and logic. The kingdom of love does not come with observation. Your heart, not your head, must reveal it to you. But if you have no heart, as you are doing your best to convince me, then God help you! Why, love in the inner world is what the sun is in the outer; and, if your inner world is a sunless one, I could no more show you that life was a precious thing than I could show you that the sea was blue at midnight."

love;

"Reason," said Marsham, "can not kindle
but reason assuredly can quench it."
“Nonsense!” she cried contemptuously.
"What man can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus ?'"

"You can not by reason," he said, "cure love as a caprice; but the love which is a caprice only is not the love you speak of. And love as an absorbing and life-long devotion, which takes into itself a man's whole ambitions and emotions -love like this, reason assuredly can quenchfor those at least who have no faith to sustain them. Such love, you say, is the sun of the inner world. You are mistaken. It is not the sun, it is the moon. The moon is human affection, but the sun is divine faith. You, who are a Catholic, forget all this; for you know nothing of the loss from which others are suffering. But, to offer love to those who have lost religion, is to tell the poor to eat jam-tarts, when they cry to you that they have got no bread."

"I forget nothing," she said angrily. "I am a Catholic, it is true, and I trust I value my religion properly. But religion has nothing to do with the present question. You are beginning the matter at the wrong end. If you want to be a religious man, you must first be a man; and you are not a man if you do not know how to love. How will you love God whom you have not seen, if you do not love your brother whom you have seen?"

"That does but mean," he replied, "that if the tree is healthy it will bear fruit; not that we

can have fruit without having a tree to bear it. You are confounding two things. Love is either a sacrament or a self-indulgence. If it be the former, the very essence of it is that it points to something beyond itself; and its power, in that case, must die if our belief in that something ceases. If it be the latter, it is a feeling only-"

"

'A feeling only!" she exclaimed; "yes, indeed, it is a feeling only, but a feeling so rapturous and so sacred that it needs nothing beyond itself, except our thanks to the God who gave it -God the giver, who at such times willingly stands aside, that his children may enjoy together this precious and most perfect gift."

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Surely," said Marsham, this is a strange view for you, a Catholic. You profess a faith which teaches you that the one thing really worth our living for is the love, not of woman, but of God; and, though human love is indeed recognized, and blest by it, yet for those who would be perfect it points out a more excellent way."

"We can not all be saints," she said; "it was not meant we should be. But it is the same intense and fervent nature that is common both to the lover and the saint: nor was there ever a great saint, who, had he but just fallen short of sanctity, would not have been a great lover instead."

"I think St. Paul," said Marsham, "would smile if you told him that; so, too, would St. Augustine; and they, both of them, I believe, are high authorities with you."

"They are," she said; "but they lived in different times from ours, and we never can judge them by our own standards. Catholic though I am, I believe as firmly as any freethinker that an increasing purpose runs through the ages, and that, with the process of the suns, the thoughts of men widen. Love as we know it—as it has pleased God we should know it-was not known in the days either of St. Paul or of St. Augustine. It has been a growing revelation made to the modern world; and to me, who believe in God, it seems a strange instance of his providence, that just at these present days, when men are denying the supernatural, he should have made it up to them by disclosing to them how divine is the natural."

"You might as well say," he replied, “that he made up to them by the moon for the complete extinction of the sun."

"Not the extinction," she said, "but the withdrawal merely. Surely the moon shines for us, whether we believe the sun exists or no." "Yes," he said, "but the inner universe is not like the outer. Over the outer we have no power, but over the inner universe we have. This last is for each one of us, in part, our own creation; and just as it was the Spirit of God that

brooded over the chaos of matter, and fashioned out of it this fair order, so is it in each one of us the spirit of faith in God that broods over the chaos of the affections and fashions out of them the feelings which you call so holy. When a man loves a woman as you think he ought to love her, does he love her body only, or her soul also? Does he not look on her as a being who, though she is bound to him, yet is bound also to something above himself? Does he not feel that the woman's soul, as Goethe says, leads him upward and onward?"

"He does," she interrupted; "and can you understand all this so well, and yet not see what a pearl of price is in this life offered you?"

"But what will happen," he said, "suppose we believe there is no Soul, that there is no Above, and that there is no Beyond? This it is that the modern world is believing. And the sensation in this case, that we are moving upward, is of no more meaning or value than the feeling in a dream, that we are falling miles downward, when in reality we are all the while in uneasy rest upon our pillows. Again, I tell you, you are confusing two things; you are confusing love the sacrament with love the self-indulgence. The latter will last its day without any religious faith, it is true; just as the bread and wine of the Eucharist have taste and being for believers and unbelievers equally; but it depends on your belief, and not on your natural senses, whether you think it worth while to make your heart clean to receive them."

"Say no more," she exclaimed impetuously, her voice at one moment almost breaking with some ambiguous feeling; "you are talking about what you know nothing of, and you are trying to hide your want of all natural affection under the pretense of a desire for an affection above the natural. You have never known love. You are too mean and shallow-hearted to be capable of it."

"Just now," he replied, "I believe that I belied myself, or rather I did not care entirely to confess myself. Lady Di, I have known the feeling you speak of in all its glad and in all its sad intensity. For days I have gone almost fasting, and for nights almost sleepless, for the love of one woman. Her being seemed to have entered into mine-her thoughts into my thoughts. She was a viewless presence for me in the flowers, in the windy mountains, and in the moonlight as it lay floating on the midnight ripples. When the very veins in my temples throbbed, and I felt their pulses, it seemed to be her blood that was beating in them."

"And yet," exclaimed Lady Di bitterly, "all the time you felt this for another woman, you could loiter here with me-to all appearance

quite absorbed in my company, and hanging almost like a lover on every word I uttered. It is lucky, Mr. Marsham, that my affections were never set upon you. God save me from the insult of devotion such as yours, which is distracted from its professed object by even attractions so poor as mine, and which is equally false and contemptible in either case."

"Surely, Lady Di," said Marsham, looking into her eyes softly, "you should not be hard on me for the collapse of any affection when it was caused in a great measure by your own charms, and by your own large sympathies. It was you who helped to shatter my poor ideal by showing how much there was in womanhood that my ideal did not comprehend; and, as I gradually grew to see this more clearly, I seemed like a man waking from a fevered dream. I seemed to be finding myself and my sane judgment again, which I had so long lost."

He stopped. She took her eyes from his; her head drooped, and she remained for a long while thoughtful. It is strange by what simple magic the world of a woman's heart is not seldom governed-how a word will turn the whole sea of her thoughts from sweet to bitter, and from bitter again to sweet! When Lady Di spoke once more, her manner was wholly changed. She laid her hand upon Marsham's arm, and said sweetly and regretfully: "Forgive me; I have been very hard on you. Your hour is not yet come, my friend; and that is all. But it will come soon, I feel a strange assurance; and it may come too, perhaps, when you are least expecting it."

She rose, as she said this, with a slight shudder. "It is turning chilly," she said. "Suppose we go in-doors. At sunset it is so much colder than at night."

In-doors Marsham was half annoyed and half relieved to discover that an old maiden lady in spectacles, once Lady Di's governess, and now her companion, had meanwhile made her appearance from the upper regions, and was to give dullness and propriety to what else would have been a tête-à-tête dinner. She at any rate prevented a renewal of the delicate and embarrassing discussions that had occupied the afternoon; and for this both of those who had taken part in them were not ungrateful. Lady Di's indignation and anger seemed quite laid at rest; and she conversed with a brightness and an eagerness which, when she appealed to Marsham, seemed to carry a subtile caress with it. After dinner the moon had risen. The night was mild and splendid. “I will come out with you," said Lady Di, "and we will watch for your friends from Monaco. Before long we may expect their boat at the landing-stage."

They stood together, leaning on a pale balustrade, with the glittering sea below, and the fronds of a tall palm feathering dark above them. Lady Di, as Marsham felt sure she would, returned almost instantly to the old topic.

"My brother," she said, "if I may still call you by the old name, my old interest in you has never waned; and it was because that interest was so genuine that I just now spoke so harshly. Do not be angry with me because I was shocked at the state you had sunk to. I was shocked only at it, because it was so unworthy of yourself -you who are by nature so faithful and so generous, and (though you yourself may not know it) so passionately and so nobly affectionate." Unperceived by his companion, Marsham smiled slightly. She went on in hurried, earnest accents: "Some day, it may be soon, the power of loving that seems so lost to you will return, I know it will; and then the life that you now despise will become transfigured to you. Scales will fall from your eyes, and you will see it in all its solemn value. You will but cross a step or two of dubious twilight'; then a new glory will break on you, 'which never was on sea or land'; and you will stand amazed and in reverent rapture at the changed landscape-at

'. . . . the novel

Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of.'

Bear with me a moment longer. You say you have lost faith. My friend, I can sympathize with you there: I, too, at times, have wellnigh lost mine. But, as my hope in another life grew fainter, my belief in this one grew only the more passionate. I am now speaking to you not as a Catholic. Forget that I am one. My religion has nothing to do with the truth that I am trying to teach you. I am speaking to you but as a woman simply, with a woman's natural affections, and a woman's natural insight. I am showing you how you can know what life is; and how you only despise it now from rejecting the one thing in it that is of value."

again suffer from. Love to me was a hot atmosphere; it made my life like a fevered dream; it distorted everything out of its true proportions. It lured me to think a woman perfect who my judgment told me was not perfect. It was a physical, an intellectual, and an emotional tether to me."

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Mr. Marsham!" she exclaimed, in a voice almost inaudible. She pressed her hand to her forehead, and felt the few lines which she knew were written on it deepened by a sudden pain. She moved a pace or two away, and murmured to herself in a broken whisper:

"He loves not hollow cheek and faded eye!

Yet, O my friend, and would you have me die?'"

Marsham could hear nothing of this; but he was utterly taken aback by the intensity of her feeling, though the exact nature of it never crossed his mind.

"I could never have dreamed," he said, "that you took life thus seriously. To me you always seemed the embodiment of a light, delicate cynicism, half contemptuous and half regretful. You seemed to look at things with a mixture of irony and tenderness which to me was peculiarly piquant and attractive, but which I could never have believed compatible with such earnestness as you show now. How could I think that a woman who would countenance Mrs. Crane, who could lightly discuss a scandal either with or about Lord Surbiton, who could move among the most doubtful topics with the delicate ease that only comes of familiarity-how could I think that such a woman was in reality the solemn believer in the most severe and intense form of all human affection?"

"Are you so poor an observer of human nature as that?" she answered. "I am not of the world, but I still am in it; and I know it too well to be surprised at its ways. But I estimate its men and women at their true worth; and, for this reason, I can hardly restrain my tears at the thought that you are rapidly becoming one of

"And can all love in this way?" said Mar- them." sham.

"And so you think that from them," said

"All," said Lady Di. "God be thanked, even Marsham, "the true value of life is hidden?" the meanest of his creatures."

But do you think," said Marsham, "that they would so love even if they could? My sister, if I may give you the counterpart of the kind name you give me, I am one-and I say this in all seriousness-who would not so love even if he could. And it is you-your own charming self-who have taught me to feel this, and have neutralized your own gospel. The fascination that your company had for me those years ago was its calm and its coolness-the utter absence from it of that very feeling which you would have me

"Hidden!" she echoed, with her head averted. "They do not even dream of its existence ! Lord Surbiton is a man of genius, and he once, doubtless, had the eye to see. But he consecrated what might have been his affections to his own dissolute self-indulgence, and what still is his genius, to his own contemptible vanity. you hear him mouthing out at breakfast that every savage can love'?—as if, when a man did truly love, he were not at once, in the deepest sense, civilized, no matter how lowly his lot, or how seemingly poor his education."

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