im
aright when she had said that he wished her to have faith in him for her
own sake. Could he save her in spite of herself? and how? He could not
see her, except by chance. Was she waiting until he should have crossed
the bar before she should pay some inexorable penalty of which he knew
nothing?

Thus he speculated, suffered, was at once cast down and lifted up by
the thought of her. To him, at least, she was one of those rare and
dauntless women, the red stars of history, by whom the Dantes and
Leonardos are fired to express the inexpressible, and common clay is
fused and made mad: one of those women who, the more they reveal, become
the more inscrutable. Divinely inarticulate, he called her; arousing the
passion of the man, yet stirring the sublimer efforts of the god.

What her feelings toward him, whether she loved him as a woman loves a
man he could not say, no man being a judge in the supreme instance. She
beheld him emancipated, perhaps, from what she might have called the
fetters of an orthodoxy for which she felt an instinctive antagonism;
but whether, though proclaiming himself free, the fact of his
continuation in the ministry would not of itself set up in her a
reaction, he was unable to predict. Her antipathy to forms, he saw,
was inherent. Her interest--her fascinated absorption, it might be
called--in his struggle was spiritual, indeed, but it also had mixed
in it the individualistic zeal of the nonconformist. She resented the
trammels of society; though she suffered from her efforts to transcend
them. The course he had determined upon appeared to her as a rebellion
not only against a cut-and-dried state of mind, but also against vested
privilege. Yet she had in her, as she confessed, the craving for what
privilege brings in the way of harmonious surroundings. He loved her for
her contradictions.

Thus he was utterly unable to see what the future held for him in the
way of continued communion with her, to evolve any satisfactory theory
as to why she remained in the city. She had told him that the gardens
were an excuse. She had come, by her own intimation, to reflect, to
decide some momentous question. Marriage? He found this too agitating to
dwell upon, summoning, as it did, conjectures of the men she might have
known; and it was perhaps natural, in view of her attitude, that he
could only think of such a decision on her part as surrender.

That he had caught and held her attention, although by no