aint or a martyr, although she
could better understand Hunsdon's estimate by picturing him born three
centuries earlier. But they were the eyes of the undying idealist, of
the inner vision, of a mental and spiritual life apart from the
frailties of the body. They seemed to look at her, intent as was his
gaze, as from a vast distance, from heights which neither she nor all
that respectable world that despised his poor shell could ever attain.
With it all there was no hint of superciliousness: the eyes were too
sad, too terribly wise in their own way for that; and his whole manner
went far beyond modesty; it had all the pitiable self-consciousness
of one that has fallen from the higher social plane. No common man, no
matter what his fame and offences, could lose his self-respect as this
poor gentleman had done. Anne, filled with a pity she had never known
was in her, exerted herself to divert his mind from the gulf which had
so long separated him from his class. She talked as she fancied other
women must have talked to him when he visited London in the first
flush of his youth and fame. She even began with "The Blue Sepulchre,"
which now no longer ranked with the best of his work, so far had he
progressed beyond the unlicensed imagination of youth. She told him
that she looked down from her balcony every morning expecting to see
the domes and towers of ancient cities rise from the sea. And, alas!
in the enthusiasm of her cause, before she could call a halt, she had
told him all that his poetry had meant to her in her lonely life by
the North Sea; in a few moments he was aware that she possessed every
volume he had written, knew every line by heart; and although she
caught herself up in time jealously to conceal the more portentous
meanings it had held for her, he heard enough to make his eyes kindle
at this delicious echo of his youth, coming from an innocent lovely
creature who had evidently heard little of his evil life.

"I knew that you came from the sea!" he exclaimed. "And the purple
rolling moors! How well I remember them, and longed to write of them.
But only these latitudes drive my pen. Indeed, I once tried to write
about the heather--the purple twilight--no figment of the poetical
fancy, that. The atmosphere at that hour literally is purple."

"When it _is_ purple! But you should see the moors in all their moods
as I have done. I rarely missed a day in winter, no matter how wild--I
have tramped half a day many