d ever reached him before. He had
never believed in the divine. He had always been irreligious, scoffing
good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their immortality of the soul. There
was no life beyond, he had contended; it was here and now, then darkness
everlasting. But what he had seen in her eyes was soul--immortal soul
that could never die. No man he had known, nor any woman, had given him
the message of immortality. But she had. She had whispered it to him
the first moment she looked at him. Her face shimmered before his eyes
as he walked along,--pale and serious, sweet and sensitive, smiling with
pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and pure as he had
never dreamed purity could be. Her purity smote him like a blow. It
startled him. He had known good and bad; but purity, as an attribute of
existence, had never entered his mind. And now, in her, he conceived
purity to be the superlative of goodness and of cleanness, the sum of
which constituted eternal life.

And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life. He was not fit
to carry water for her--he knew that; it was a miracle of luck and a
fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be with her and talk
with her that night. It was accidental. There was no merit in it. He
did not deserve such fortune. His mood was essentially religious. He
was humble and meek, filled with self-disparagement and abasement. In
such frame of mind sinners come to the penitent form. He was convicted
of sin. But as the meek and lowly at the penitent form catch splendid
glimpses of their future lordly existence, so did he catch similar
glimpses of the state he would gain to by possessing her. But this
possession of her was dim and nebulous and totally different from
possession as he had known it. Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw
himself climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her,
pleasuring in beautiful and noble things with her. It was a
soul-possession he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free
comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite thought. He
did not think it. For that matter, he did not think at all. Sensation
usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with emotions he had
never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of sensibility where feeling
itself was exalted and spiritualized and carried beyond the summits of
life.

He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring ferventl